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Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break
  • I got a stainless steel one on Amazon, it's relatively thick steel, I have no idea how you'd be able to break it with only your hands and feet. I agree the plastic ones are shit.

    Edit: The brand was apparently "NINEMAX". (Not a sponsor lol)

  • Why I Haven't Seen Any Trump Supporters In Fediverse (Lemmy and Mastodon)?
  • I think the hard-right people have mostly self-exiled to their own echo chambers like truth.social and other places that are Donald-used-and-approved. I think he's also active on Twitter again now that Musk has destroyed all content moderation on the platform. They follow their great leader and unless and until he starts posting his demagoguery on Lemmy they have no interest and no reason to come here.

  • Microsoft is bringing annoying Windows 11 Start menu ads to Windows 10
  • Smartest users are already using OpenShell and don't have anything to fear, at least from this change... for now...

  • Desalination in a freezer?
  • 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.

  • Mom comes to pick up driver accused of stunt driving on Hwy. 417 in Ottawa
  • On the first offense, depending on circumstances. On the second offense, without exception.

  • What self hosting feels like (It's painful, please help 🥲)
  • 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.

  • What is the secret to making LED light bulbs last as long as the package says?
  • 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.

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    *Permanently Deleted*
  • So it's not really FOSS at all, it's just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

  • AiTracker.art: A Torrent Tracker For AI Models
  • I tried to download one and it accused me of being a bot and looped me through a capcha twice in a row and I gave up. *shrug* Otherwise seems like a good idea. Good luck.

  • Ingenious ways to measure power draw
  • While it sounds a bit hacky, I think this is an underrated solution. It's actually quite a clever way to bypass the whole problem. Physics is your enemy here, not economics.

    This is kind of like trying to find an electric motor with the highest efficiency and torque at 1 RPM. While it's not theoretically impossible, it's not just a matter of price or design, it's a matter of asking the equipment to do something it's simply not good at, while you want to do it really well. It can't, certainly not affordably or without significant compromises in other areas. In the case of a motor, you'd be better off letting the motor spin at its much higher optimal RPM and gear it down, even though there will be a little loss in the geartrain it's still a much better solution overall and that's why essentially every low speed motor is designed this way.

    In the case of an ammeter, it seems totally reasonable to bring it up to a more ideal operating range by adding a constant artificial load. In fact the high precision/low range multimeters and oscilloscopes are usually internally doing almost exactly the same thing with their probes, just in a somewhat more complex way behind the scenes.

  • Not to be that guy
  • The end result is exactly the same.

    The difference is that you can install an iso on a computer without an internet connection. The normal iso contains copies of most or all relevant packages. Although maybe not all of the latest and most up to date ones, the bulk are enough to get you started. The net install, like the name suggests, requires an internet connection to download packages for anything except the most minimal, bare-bones configuration. The connection would hopefully be nearly as fast if not faster than the iso and be guaranteed to have the latest updates available which the iso may not. While such a fast connection is usually taken for granted nowadays, it is not always available in some situations and locations, it is not always convenient, and some hardware may have difficulty with the network stack that may be difficult to resolve before a full system is installed or may require specialized tools to configure or diagnose that are only available as packages.

    In almost all cases, the netinst works great and is a more efficient and sensible way to install. However, if it doesn't work well in your particular situation, the iso will be more reliable, with some downsides and redundancy that wastes disk space and time.

    Things like windows updates and some large and complex software programs and systems often come with similar "web" and "offline" installers that make the same distinctions for the same reasons. The tradeoff is the same, as both options have valid use cases.

  • Not to be that guy
  • To be fair, in the case of something like a Linux ISO, you are only a tiny fraction of the target or you may not even need to be the target at all to become collateral damage. You only need to be worth $1 to the attacker if there's 99,999 other people downloading it too, or if there's one other guy who is worth $99,999 and you don't need to be worth anything if the guy/organization they're targeting is worth $10 million. Obviously there are other challenges that would be involved in attacking the torrent swarm like the fact that you're not likely to have a sole seeder with corrupted checksums, and a naive implementation will almost certainly end up with a corrupted file instead of a working attack, but to someone with the resources and motivation to plan something like this it could get dangerous pretty quickly.

    Supply chain attacks are increasingly becoming a serious risk, and we do need to start looking at upgrading security on things like the checksums we're using to harden them against attackers, who are realizing that this can be a very effective and relatively cheap way to widely distribute malware.

  • How responsive is your Nextcloud?
  • I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I've started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.

  • Why does BIOS suck?
  • The setting you described sounds like a motherboard manufacturer issue. There's no reason for it not to default to "auto" unless that somehow limits something else they wanted to have on by default. They choose the defaults, and they chose that one, even if it's stupid. Either that, or you set it somehow previously and didn't realize or forgot you did.

  • Self hosted NAS + Lightweight Game Streaming Solution?
  • 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.

  • How does one bulk-replace all of their Reddit writings with pro-lemmy propaganda ?
  • Joke's on Reddit, I've always been posting unhinged misinformation.

  • GIMP - GIMP 2.99.18 Released: The Last Development Preview Before 3.0!
  • I really like what they're doing to GIMP lately and I am looking forward to 3.0!

  • Utility of Arc Furnace Versus Other Heat Sources
  • Yes, you could probably use a laser furnace if it was cost-effective at those power levels. But it's not even close. Arcs are and very practical in almost every sense and ridiculously cheap besides the power they consume. And a laser would consume more.

  • Tunnelling a port from a separate computer
  • You can also automate this with autossh which is designed for exactly this kind of persistent tunnel. Although a simple "while" loop might seem like the intuitive way to keep it running, autossh is very reliable and takes care of all the corner cases for you.

  • BambuLab recall: Should you replace the cable yourself? ft. EN 50678
  • DC adds an extra layer of isolation if something goes wrong, and an extra place for it to fail safely in a nicely enclosed metal box. It takes a really catastrophic failure for a 28A DC power supply to go much beyond 28A for very long. A mains supply can do it all day long unless there's some other form of protection like a fuse or isolation transformer.

  • Build a PC @lemmy.ca cecilkorik @lemmy.ca
    Recommend me a high end case (mid/full tower) with practical features, no tempered glass and minimal decoration

    I don't like the weight or fragility of huge tempered glass side panels which seems to be the default for any case that is over $100... plexiglass/acrylic and some RGB are acceptable although honestly the aesthetics are pretty much irrelevant and I don't need them. I don't want a "cheap" case either. I've cut enough fingers on poorly finished steel rattle-trap boxes and I really can't stand them.

    Enough about what I don't want though. What I DO want is a case that's focused on practical features, good airflow, quiet, well-made, easy to build in, roomy without being absurdly enormous, not too unconventionally laid out so that wires will reach while allowing good cable management -- basically, something that was designed thoughtfully.

    My current case is a Corsair 900D and other than the fact that it's way bigger than I'd like, I'm generally pretty happy with it, but I'm not sure what else is out there that would even be comparable, Corsair seems to have gone to tempered glass in all their larger cases and I'm not very familiar with all the other manufacturers out there nowadays.

    9
    cecilkorik cecilkorik @lemmy.ca
    Posts 1
    Comments 99