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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s not difficult it’s just expensive and energy intensive, and frankly boiling water is both cheaper and easier and we’ve had lots of experience doing it in massive quantities since the steam age and it works great and gives off steam or hot water which can be used for lots more stuff like heating and even power generation. Ice is almost useless in comparison.

    As for why you can’t freeze salt into ice, they don’t mix. It’s like trying to mix oil and water. Technically, if you get the ice really really cold and mash it up with some equally cold salt you could make some kind of mixture of ice and salt and maybe even compress it together until it forms a solid mass again, but it’s not saltwater ice, it’s just salt and ice mixed together like oil and water. They may appear mixed, but they don’t mix, they don’t dissolve into each other. Ice’s crystal structure does not have anywhere for the salt to go and the salt’s crystal structure doesn’t have anywhere for the ice to go they’re not compatible in any way.


  • Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.

    Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.


  • Most cheap non-dimmable LEDs have drivers that use resistors to determine the current to drive through the LEDs. As a rule, these are always set too high to overdrive the LEDs (sometimes as much as twice their rated current) for marginal brightness gains and to burn out the bulb prematurely. I’m obviously unable to actually see directly into the operation of the great minds that design LED lightbulbs but logic leaves me with only those two plausible conclusions, I’ll let you decide which motivation you think is a bigger factor for most manufacturers.

    Conveniently, most manufacturers carefully fine-tune this value to prematurely destroy the LEDs at just the right time, which requires careful balancing of resistors, and even MORE conveniently (for us) the cheapest way for them to do this is typically to use two resistors. And MOST conveniently (for us), if you were to carelessly break one of the pair of resistors they use, and leave the other one intact, the current would immediately drop to a very reasonable and appropriate level, generating much less heat, drawing much less power, making LED death extremely unlikely, and only modestly reducing brightness in many cases, because LEDs have non-linear brightness and the heavily overdriven ones are typically FAR beyond the point of diminishing returns. In some cases the reduction in power results in basically no visible difference in light output. In some cases it can be argued they’re literally stealing extra power from your electricity bill and using it as an electric heater for no purpose other than to burn out your own light bulbs prematurely so you have to replace them.

    The good news is, like I said, removing one of the responsible resistors instantly solves the design flaw and is usually quite easy even without any special tools or electronics knowledge. BigCliveDotCom calls this “Doobying” the bulbs after the Dubai bulbs that were mentioned in other comments. If you watch some of his videos about LED bulbs you should be able to see the pattern of which resistors to remove, if they are on the board they will basically always be right next to each other and relatively small values (typically in the 20 ohms to 200 ohms range). The only modification I make to his procedure is that I prefer to remove the HIGHER value of the two resistors instead of the lower one, which results in perhaps somewhat less lifetime preservation (still much more than the original setting) and less power savings, but more brightness, and is usually adequately good for my purposes. I also use sturdy tweezers to remove the resistor instead of a screwdriver which seems to me that it would have a higher risk of collateral damage.

    Is it a lot of work for a single light bulb? Kind of, yes. But once you get it done a bunch of times, you’ll probably rarely have to do it again, as these bulbs last almost forever. In fact, I have yet to have one actually fail, I am mostly just replacing the occasional old unmodified LED bulb from time to time.

    This will not work with dimmable bulbs or certain fancy high end bulbs. Also some are much, much easier to modify than others. Clive calls the ones that are relatively easy “hackable” and it’s really a crapshoot to find them. Some have covers/bulbs/diffusers that are nearly impossible to remove without catastrophic damage to the bulb and/or your hands. Others simply use a different circuit design that doesn’t have resistors. Some only have a single resistor, meaning to change the value you need to solder a new one in its place. In my experience, the bargain-basement, junkiest, least reliable bulbs tend to be the easiest to hack this way and often skimp on things like “gluing the lens on” so it’s easy to get off. But you’ll have to experiment to find a brand and style that works well for this.



  • I feel like you are the one who is confusing a “NAS device” or “NAS appliance” as in a device that is specifically designed and primarily intended to provide NAS services (ie, its main attribute is large disks, with little design weight given to processing, RAM or other components except to the extent needed to provide NAS service), and a NAS service itself, which can be provided by any generic device simultaneously capable of both storage and networking, although often quite poorly.

    You are asserting the term “NAS” in this thread refers exclusively to the former device/appliance, everyone else is assuming the latter. In fact, both are correct and context suggests the latter, although I’m sure given your behavior in this thread you will promptly reply that only your interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong. If you want to assert that, go right ahead and make yourself look foolish.




  • Keep the gray plastic. Remove black clip around the vertical wheel post in the gray plastic. Remove wheel and wheel post. Buy new wheel. Installl new wheel. It will be easier to find a new wheel once you have the old wheel out so you can take measurements. but it’s likely something pretty standard, off-the-shelf. Wheels are something that companies buy, they rarely build them themselves. They typically come as a castoring assembly with wheel, axle, spindle, and attachment post in a variety of common sizes and with a dizzying variety of actual wheels.


  • a) Forecasts are very resource-intensive, they are performed on a specific schedule using a computational forecast model. Updating the predictions would require inputting new data and running the model again, and by the time they do that, the next forecast will already be out.

    b) Do they know it’s wrong? Where did you get the temperature? From an official weather station? If not, there is no reason to imagine that someone is noticing that this one particular model run was wrong in one particular spot across the whole country and trying to fix it in real time.

    c) If you did get the current temperature from an official weather station, that IS your update for it. Real time data from official weather stations is always going to trump the forecast model. What would be the point of updating the forecast when the current measured data from the weather station is now available? That’s like driving down the highway and saying “I was predicting my speed would be close to 65mph, but due to the heavy traffic I’m seeing today, I’m going to re-estimate my speed to be 45mph” when you have a perfectly accurate speedometer right in front of you telling you exactly what speed you are going at all times. Forecasts are only useful for the future, and they can be wrong.



  • I would need to factory reset the whole server for that, which would be … highly inconvenient for me. It took me quite a long time to get everything working, and I don’t wanna loose my configuration.

    This is your actual problem you need to solve. Reinstalling your server should be as convenient as installing a basic OS and running a configuration script. It needs to be reproducible and documented, not some mystery black box of subtle configurations you’ve forgotten about ages ago. A nice, idempotent configuration script is both convenient and a self-documenting system for tracking all the changes you’ve ever implemented on your server.

    Once you can do that, adding whatever encryption you want is just a matter of finding the right sequence of commands, testing it (in another docker perhaps) and then running your configuration script to migrate your server into the desired state.



  • I can’t live without my Nextcloud + Email server. Having all my personal files, contacts, email, calendar, and other personal information immediately accessible synced and backed up with a single app on any device or platform I want to use, is a dream come true, and I get to do it without any Big Tech, avoiding their lock-in and privacy invasion and without any fees or limits beyond my own hardware.

    OpenVPN is how I can access it from anywhere in the world, so that gets an honorable mention too.


  • It’s veeeeery not standard in Canada. I use it on my phone and most people who see it on the lockscreen treat me like I’m an alien, and it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who simply think 24 hour time is weird (but at least recognize it) vs. people who seem genuinely baffled by the digits they see appearing on my phone and don’t even seem to recognize it as a time at all.


  • A Dockerfile is basically just a script that starts a container image (ranging from standard Linux OS installs like ubuntu or debian or alpine to the very specialized pre-made containers with every piece of software you want already installed and configured and everything unnecessary stripped away) and then does various stuff to it (copies files/dirs from local, runs commands, configures networking). It’s all very straightforward, and if you know how to write a bash script or even just a basic batch file that’s pretty much all its doing, and the end result is a container, which is basically a miniature Linux virtual machine (that is supposed to be “single purpose” but there’s no technical limitation forcing it to be)

    The simplest way to create a container is to use a standard OS container as I mentioned and install the software you want exactly as you normally would in that OS, using the OS package manager if you want, following tutorials for that OS or installing manually using the instructions from the software itself. Either way should work fine. Again, it’s basically not much different from having a virtual machine running that OS. You can even start up a root bash prompt and install it that way if you prefer, or even connect over ssh by running an sshd server on it (although that’s totally uneccessary and requires extra work).

    For basic Dockerfile syntax, look at other people’s Dockerfiles and realize you probably don’t need 90% of the more complex ones. There are millions of them out there, you should be able to find some simple straightforward ones and just mimic those. Will you run into “gotchas”? Sure you will, Docker is full of them, and when you do your Dockerfile will get a little more complex as you find a way to deal with the problem Docker has created for you. Here’s a pretty simple tutorial example of a Dockerfile that just installs a bunch of packages from Debian and doesn’t even run any specific services, or alternatively here’s a Dockerfile that does nothing but run and configure an ssh server like I mentioned above (again that’s totally unnecessary normally but the point is you can certainly do it if you want to!)


  • No good reason, just historical inertia and resistance to change. People stick to what they’re familiar with, either the imperial system or to common metric units. Making a “metric ton” similar in size to an “imperial ton” arguably helped make it easier for some people to transition to metric.

    Megagram is a perfectly cromulent unit, just like “cromulent” is a perfectly cromulent word, but people still don’t use it very often. That’s just how language works. People use the words they prefer, and those words become common. Maybe if you start describing things in megagrams other people will also start doing it and it will become a common part of the language. Language is organic like that, there isn’t anyone making decisions on its behalf, although some people and organizations try.



  • If you can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that someone is ignorant of facts, and then sure you can call it obvious and good. But when nobody can agree what is reasonable, why is your perspective of good the one everyone must follow? It’s not always obvious. Don’t pretend it is. And things that are reasonable and obvious to you aren’t necessarily reasonable and obvious to others. You aren’t willing to embrace the diversity of human experience and opinion, so you won’t get the benefits of that diversity. Just because someone else has a different idea doesn’t make it wrong. If you think literally every idea that isn’t exactly the same as yours is wrong, then we’re wasting our time here anyway.

    So again, why is your path the one we’re picking? Even if I do agree with it, I am not willing to agree to it blindly, I want to know why we’re supposed to follow your advice/instructions/demands. At gunpoint or otherwise. And that’s why I’ll never follow a totalitarian, because totalitarians never have to explain themselves, and generally won’t. I hope you brought enough bullets if that’s your plan.