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Hearing is be-leafing: Students invent quieter leaf blower
  • Not necessarily for sound, on industrial fans and drives, we can program in skip frequencies to avoid any resonance issues in the system. I've never done it for noise reduction. But I do some tweaks for efficiency and power consumption reduction. There's some wild industrial design stuff out there, and in the end, it's because it provides something the customer wants. I won't go into specifics, but you can design the same components the same for multiple manufacturers and do some slightly different things in its construction to give the vibe the OEM wants, or to fix some inherent characteristics in the manufacturers platform. It's REALLY cool when you think about it. Sorry to be so vague, but I have to be.

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    Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse
  • Admitted, I haven't read all the comments. I bought a refurbished M2 Mini to use as a cheap media server last week, and so I can use AirMessage with apple users in my life. The M2 Mini is a step down in every way from my ancient mid 2012 MacBook Pro except heat and efficiency. RAM, gotta pay extra for it. Disk space, gotta pay out the ass for it too, and you can't even get a Mini with the amount of apace I put in my mid 2012 MBP. (4TB)I want to like it, but it's SO LIMITING without paying out the ass and getting nickel and dimed for everything. I love macOS, especially compared to the disaster that is windows 10 and 11, but it's ridiculous and so anti consumer nowadays! Which to be fair, Steve Jobs' ultimate goal with all their products was to make it this way. Want to backup an iPad and iPhone? Good luck. You run out of space almost immediately with the 256GB of storage. Want to use an external disk for those backups? Use symbolic links and terminal, but you'll have to manually move them to the Mac if you ever need to restore. I have a 6tb external disk attached to it now, but I'm afraid I'm still gonna be hamstrung somehow. All my photos, time machine backups, and media are on the external for obvious reasons. I was also going to pick up a MacBook Air 15" m3 (with upgrades) from Apple, but I'm really rethinking it right now, macOS or not.

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    Which Macbook and mini as home media server/backup target
  • This is a valid point, but I also want to keep it on macOS for the AirMessage apps. And it feels like the Intel Mac's are all on life support right now. But a used Mini is much cheaper on eBay than a new one!

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  • Good day to all of you, the time has come to retire my mid 2012 MBP as my main machine. For context, it is a 13" 2.9GHz i7 model, with 16 GB of RAM, 4 TB of storage from an HDD/SSD combo with a DataDoubler, and it's been an overall great machine. However, it is beginning to have trouble turning on more regularly. It will power off and go unresponsive until I open it up and pull the battery. This machine has been outstanding to me over the years, except for this problem. I am looking at a Macbook Air 15", or the 14" Macbook Pro. I can get a Macbook Air 15" with M3, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and in Midnight for $1699 locally. Or I can get a Macbook Pro 14" with M3 Pro, 18 GB RAM, and a 512 GB SSD for $1799. I am concerned about the lock-in with memory on the new Macs. It is very much like an iPad in that I have to buy everything exactly like I want it, and that's it. Is 16 GB or 18 GB of RAM enough to last me several years? I know Apple says that RAM on their new devices isn't the same as normal RAM, but I struggle with that assertion. Use cases are various Office apps, a ton of Excel work, Photoshop, some video editing with iMovie, media conversion with Handbrake, maybe some Parallels Windows 11 work since there are some apps that still are Windows only. And I may have to use QEMU for this task, we'll have to see. I'm no stranger to virtualization.

    Next, a similar question, I am looking at using an M2 Mini as a backup NAS/TimeMachine target with external disks (replacing my ancient TimeCapsule), an iPhoto (Photos) backup target, iTunes/videos/music host, migrate some Docker containers from Raspberry Pis, Android backup target, and an AirMessage host so that I can talk to family easier on Android. The only Mac Minis I can find locally are 8GB RAM. Similar to above, this bothers me. Is 8GB enough for what's gonna be a machine thrown in a closet and let to run all these tasks? I had an Intel mini (early 2009?) doing similar tasks years ago, but a power surge got it and i never replaced it.

    Thank you for your time.

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    Hackintosh is (almost) dead
  • My mid 2012 has been upgraded to the max. It's got the 2.9GHz dual core i7, 16 GB RAM, 4 tb of storage thanks to a data doubler, and is running MacOS 14.4. I've been getting kernel panics lately, and sometimes struggle getting it to turn on, I'm afraid it's getting time to retire it. It's unfortunate, but this has been an outstanding laptop for me. I dual boot windows and macos on it. Perhaps I'll put fedora on it shortly and see if it behaves any better.

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    Most battery friendly charging
  • My 6 pro won't slow charge until after 10pm I've noticed. My alarm is at 04:30, so if I start charging at bedtime, 08:30ish, it doesn't slow charge. It's weird that way. Already on my second 6p, my first I've died one night, woke up with a flashing gray white screen, and it was hot. Got it rmad thankfully.

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    What software you consider so bad it made you happy when you left your job?
  • I had this same discussion at work. My employer is full office 365 and SharePoint for everything. Teams is a catch-all app that does a lot, but none of it well.

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    What Would Happen if Every American Got a Heat Pump
  • So this interests me. I live in a home built in 1920. I have a modern ish furnace installed in 2012. I used 143CCFC of natural gas in January due to the severe cold, for a bill of $226.56. I used Copilot to tell me how to calculate this, so if it is wrong, please let me know. 1 CCFC is 2.832 cubic meters. So I used 404.976 cubic meters of gas. 1 cubic meter of gas is 11 kWh roughly. So I used 4454.726 kWh worth of gas last month. My electric rate from the bastards at Alabama Power/Southern Company is $0.114207 per kWh. So to use electricity, my bill would be $508.76 instead. A swag at furnace efficiency means roughly 80% of my gas went to heating my house. So even reducing that kWh by 20% doesn't put me ahead. 3565.368 kWh at $0.114207 is still $407.19. Am I missing something? Did Copilot mislead me? Because the savings aren't there from this math. How do I factor heat pump efficiency in here?

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    Seeking Linux-Friendly SCADA for Wastewater Treatment Automation
  • As others have said, Inductive Automation 's Ignition is a fine SCADA platform that runs on Linux. I used it for years until my employer decided we should get rid of Ignition and use OSISoft Pi for data visualization. It's a ridiculous idea, as they are different products with different use cases, but I lost that argument and have been told to drop it. Still salty, all those development hours and useful tools gone.

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    My country/city has a new COVID wave. I got infected for the third time.
  • I have been recovering from my 4th COVID infection. I've told people, it's not Pokemon, I've NOT gotta catch em all. Seems bad luck, my immune system, or shitty people I work around will continue to give it to me. 🫤

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    WebMD forcing employees back to office. "We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point. We’re informing"
  • Yes they are. As I am at home with COVID for the 4th time. I interviewed a guy in a small room a week ago Friday, and he coughed all through the interview. I was masked. He wasn't. Two of us caught it. And I found out today they hired the clown. There are strong desires to cuss him out on his first day. Fuck that guy.

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    What’s the tiniest thing about iOS / iPadOS / macOS that really bugs you?
  • macOS: Lack of official support for models that are still relevant. I've got the last MacBook Pro that was fully upgradable, a mid 2012 model with a dual core 4th gen i7. You can upgrade everything in it, and I have. 16gb of RAM, two disks, one an SSD, and the other a large HDD. But the latest official version of MacOS is Catalina. But I'm running Ventura on it now with no issues. And in similar respect, no upgradability at all of the new Macs after purchase. It's very anti consumer.

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    Health "care"
  • My wife had a miscarriage a few years back. Yeah. All we got for our trouble was a massive bill. 0/10. Fuck this shit and this place.

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    NewPipe v0.26.0 released with support for channel tabs
  • It's not YouTube that's the problem. I've got the same Gmail account since 2004, and don't want to loose my Google photos. I'm getting the stuff together to self host them all, but am not there yet.

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    NewPipe v0.26.0 released with support for channel tabs
  • So I've been wondering this for a while. Is there a way for Google to associate my usage of Newpipe or similar to my actual Google account? I hate all the ads, but don't want to lose all of my Google account stuff. I've got a lot invested in it.

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  • Mixed device household - Needing help with storing photos and backups

    Good afternoon all, I have half-assed my backups for 15 years, and it is not sustainable, and I need your help! I have the following setup: 1x Raspberry Pi 4 with a WD USB3 MyBook 4TB as a NAS target using OpenMediaVault. This works well enough, but is not in my mind a long term viable solution. 1x Apple Airport TimeCapsule A1355 2TB

    I also have a smattering of other drives collected from over the years in MyBooks, all USB 2.0 drives, a 2TB mirror edition (2x 1TB drives in RAID 0 or RAID1), 1TB, and 500GB. This does not include the random 750 GBs, 500 GB and old 250 GB drives that I’ve taken out of my Macs and PCs over the years as I’ve upgraded them. I’ve got files scattered everywhere on them, plus on my MacBook and several other PCs and Macs around the house.

    I need some help consolidating this into a single solution with priority to my photos and family home videos for data integrity. Then to a lesser extent, maybe PC backups and file storage.

    Currently all of my photos are backed up to Google Photos or Amazon photos. With the fact that neither google or amazon is to be trusted with my photos, I’m ok with dumping them. Web based backup solutions are iffy, it takes forever for a backup to complete, as I am on a 60megabit download, with about a 5megabit upload connection. According to some things I’ve seen advertised nearby, fiber is being ran throughout the area, but it may be a year or two before it comes to my neighborhood.

    For other hardware I have laying about, I have a 1st gen i7 980x system that is idle nowadays and is full of low capacity drives by today’s standards, a 2008 MacBook, the above mentioned 2012 MacBook Pro, an Atom n450 netbook, and an AMD Ryzen 5700g based prebuilt. None of them really seem to be something that would be useful as a ZFS based NAS or anything. But is a ZFS NAS or BTRFS system something that I need, or would my needs be better met by something else?

    I have also looked at an OWC Mercurydisk M-Disc compatible burner for photo and video backup.

    What are some options to look into? Preference would be on not breaking the bank and not necessarily set and forget it, but something I haven’t got to fight with to keep running.

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