Doesn’t have kids, other caring responsibilities or chronic illnesses (that they declare) therefore everyone should do what they do and are just doing life wrong. Okay.
Readit Newsoutofmyshed commented on The ROI of Exercise herman.bearblog.dev/exerc... · Posted by u/ingve
outofmyshed commented on Refurb Weekend: Atari Stacy oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/... · Posted by u/goldenskye
I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few years. I never dreamed of trying to take it anywhere - way too cumbersome.
A couple of years later someone showed me a PowerBook and that was that.
outofmyshed commented on UK to finish with coal power after 142 years bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/mhandley
A battery alone is not enough. You also need an inverter that's capable of powering your house. Most are not.
They need to e.g. provide the proper frequency on their own and entirely/physically decouple from the grid etc.
They are available but just rooftop solar and a battery is not enough.
Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and power my whole house from PV or battery up to a limit of 5kW, which is plenty to keep everything necessary running.
It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.
The IPv4 price is still tiny, and you anyway have to pay for it since going IPv6-only is not viable for a service in 2024 still. It's not going to significantly move the needle towards IPv6. And the price hikes will also be tiny.
Well, my employer’s AWS bill is in the region of $20m/year and the additional IPv4 tax is on track for adding an additional $250k to that for no benefit at all.
outofmyshed commented on What's that touchscreen in my room? laplab.me/posts/whats-tha... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
To add: Many pre-90s buildings don’t even have circuit breakers, they have fuse boxes with fuse wire (different fuse to the one being talked about). Literally just a piece of wire that burns out at a certain current and breaks the connection. You “reset” it by putting a new piece of wire in.
The second fuse at the plug allows using a narrower gauge of wire in the device’s cord. Let’s say you have a lamp with a 3A fuse, the cord only needs to be able to handle 3A, so then it can be lighter and cheaper. If it had to handle the same amperage as the circuit it’s plugged into then it would be seriously impractical and expensive.
Of course there are modern ways of solving this but fuses are dirt cheap and already implemented.
My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY stores there still must be installations out there that need it. Shudder.
outofmyshed commented on What's that touchscreen in my room? laplab.me/posts/whats-tha... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
British household electrical systems are normally built as one large ring circuit, originally in order to save copper after WW2.
This means you don't have breakers for each branch circuit (there are no branch circuits), just the single mains breaker for the house. This single breaker is too large to trip from a short from occuring in the smaller wires inside an appliance.
So each plug (or hardwired device) needs it's own dedicated smaller fuse instead.
Houses built post-1960s (with more than one floor) will have more than one socket ring each protected by a circuit breaker at the distribution board, usually one per floor for general sockets, with a separate one for the kitchen, and usually individual 32A breakers for things like electric ovens and hobs.
Lighting rings are also separate, usually on 6A breakers. We cheap out on cable by not running neutrals to the switches, which causes nerds headaches when they want to install generic smart light switches.
My house is reasonably large (worked hard, all my own money) and has a 20-way distribution board with separate socket and light rings for groups of rooms. It’s handy for isolation purposes.
More recent builds’ rings will be protected by a combination of MCBs and RCDs, or individual RCBOs (now the cost has come down) which combine the two functions and is ultimately the safest option for most situations.
Individually fusing plugs (and in the case of high-draw appliances like washing machines and dryers, protecting with a fused socket) is still a very good idea. And don’t get me started on earthing practices in other countries…
Yes, the Spectrum was poor, but it was also genius and a case study on how to deliver a brilliant balance between performance and production cost.
The existence of Elite and Driller running on such limited hardware at all is a product of true genius. Anyone decrying the Speccy doesn’t understand the impact of the price differential on its utility and popularity. No-one I knew had a BBC Micro (although they were in our schools).
outofmyshed commented on Stop using low DNS TTLs (2019) blog.apnic.net/2019/11/12... · Posted by u/doublepg23
Anyone going “just use low TTLs all the time” doesn’t have a lot of traffic to deal with.
I have a commit of ~15bn queries/month with my DNS provider ATM, and if just one busy record has its TTL set erroneously low, it can cost an extra few thousand $ a month in overages. It’s not a great conversation to have with the CFO when that happens. Caching matters.
outofmyshed commented on The first minute of every phone call is torture now theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/firstbase
I only answer the phone - and that includes FaceTime and all other audio calls - to my wife and my mum.
Everyone else - particularly cold-call sales droids - can do one.
outofmyshed commented on Powerline Adapters – the security threat (2020) community.spiceworks.com/... · Posted by u/walterbell
Sounds like the author just needed to set a non-default network key.
Powerlines suck, but when you have no other option, they suck a little less than no connectivity at all.
If your VDSL line runs anywhere near your mains wiring, they can cause crazy interference and erroring as the frequencies overlap. Some kit has a notch-out mode to avoid this (Devolo I think).