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M4 Mac Mini Power Button Has New Bottom Location
  • I have been using a MacBook trough work for 7 years now and I think I actually clicked shutdown once this year too keep the battery at ~80% during my 1 month holiday. Otherwise I maybe reboot it once every month or two to fix some weird homebrew upgrade issues. And that's it. The thing is just "on" in deep sleep, forever.

    If the Mac mini's behave similarly to the MacBooks, the standby energy usage is so low it's probably easier to just keep it in on/standby/sleep all the time and just wake it by keyboard or mouse. And because Apple develop their own hardware, standby and sleep actually work reliably. So they probably intend for you to only use that power button for a hard reset. Even shutting it down and moving it, plugging the power back in wil probably start it up again. Just like opening the lid on my shutdown MacBook also boots it before I even touch the power button. Even a keypress or mouseclick will probably turn the damn thing on.

    Yes it's an odd design choice, but in regular day to day use it probably won't matter. Especially if you realise that its not a windows machine that needs to shutdown or reboot often.

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    Starlink tells Brazil regulator it will not comply with X suspension
  • I'm sorry. How do you expect a jet flying to get even close enough to a satellite to accelerate a missile to it?

    Highest ever flow fixed wing "aircraft" is SpaceShipOne with rocket engines. Well above what a typical fighter jet might do: 112km height at 910m/s And a typical rocket will go what? Mach 2 or 3? So let's say Mach 4 at 112 km, which is 1096 m/s

    A typical Starlink orbit is either around 340km height or more typical 550km at either 7726 m/s or 7613 m/s at the different heights.

    That gives a minimum distance traveled of at least 228km and a speed gap of 6630 m/s or 23868 km/h that the missile still needs to close.

    There are probably ways that Brazil could try and destroy satellites if they want to. But launching missiles from (rocket powered) jets definitely isn't one of them.

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    Risk of Rain creators Hopoo Games join Valve
  • Don't get your hopes up. Apparently the latest RoR2 expansion was made by the new Gearbox crew and that didn't work out so well...

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    So, this cookie alert on theverge.com is both refreshingly honest and depressingly disturbing
  • How is it nonsense?

    The EU law is that the reject all should be exactly as easy as the accept all button. 1 extra click, however minor of an inconvenience it is, is extra effort. And therefore strictly speaking in violation of the law.

    Nothing will ever happen but it's valid criticism.

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    CrowdStrike IT Outage Explained by a Windows Developer
  • It's just a guy talking 99% of the time and the few visuals that are in the movie are not required to understand the story. I'd just listen to it like a podcast. The guys voice and pronunciation probably beats text to speech from a blogpost with images.

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    Major IT outage affecting banks, airlines, media outlets across the world
  • But MS had nothing to do with both the testing and rollout?

    It's a broken 3rd party component. Croudstrikes testing and rollout procedures were inadequate.

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    At least we know it works 🤷
  • But that is an easily solved problem. Take the design of the James Webb, substitute the super cooled infrared camera and replace it with a superconducting magnet setup. Fly this setup to L1 of mars and start global warming.

    I didn't come up with that. Someone at NASA did. Years ago: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe/

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    EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator
  • There are ways to somewhat fix it for circuits with a single use.

    Fixing the same example: A 16A breaker for the solar feed in, a single 16A breaker for all the consuming appliances on that circuit. And another 16A breaker on the feed in for that circuit is an example that is sometimes used in the Netherlands to add a feed in to an existing circuit with a single outlet connected to it. Meant for washingmachines for instance.

    This ensures that the circuit on all circumstances has a maximum current of 16A flowing over any wire by also measuring the outgoing current of both feed in circuits. But if you have multiple outlets you'd still need to stiol measure at a single place or use low enough breakers per outlet that the total stays below the 16A. Which the UK might have if I recall correctly.

    Then again this is not a normal setup and requires change in the electric circuit of the home. Which most consumers won't even realize. Like I said, if everyone keeps to the fine print this thing probably has and limits the extra plug-in solar panels to 1 per circuit, it's unlikely to actually cause issues because of overdimensioning of the wires. And the safety margin built in which is likely how they have gotten approval. But ignoring or not reading that text and plugging multiple in on the same circuit can and will cause a fire hazard with heavy consumers on the same circuit.

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    EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator
  • The breaker only sees the current flowing through the breaker though. Not the additional current provided by the solar panels since those don't flow through the breaker. So it will pop later then that the cables are rated for, therefore introducing an overheat and fire hazard.

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    EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator
  • Yep, I'm not exactly sure on the technical details but it works with multiple inverters. Otherwise having a street full with solar panels on every roof would still be a hazard if the power went out at a distribution junction for said street and repairs would have to be made.

    If there is no powerplant feeding some energy, all inverters should shut off. Fixed installs and plug and play variants alike. I'm actually amazed that there are parts in the world where this isn't common.

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    EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator
  • Surprisingly, no. Most inverters in the EU must come with island protection. Meaning that if there is no AC from the grid it immediatly switches off the inverter or the battery, there is no stand alone operation.

    There are some systems that allow it but they are rare here and require the mains side to be fed trough the inverter itsself ensuring it's never back feeding into the grid when there is no power with the same island protection, or less commonly there is a transfer switch of some kind also eliminating the issue. And either should obviously have a main kill switch on the breaker board for emergencies that also switches off the in home power with 1 action.

    But most importantly, either of those options is not plug and play and will require an electrician that hopefully does know what he's doing.

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    EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator
  • The cables in your walls are designed for a certain maximum current before they start to heat up. This current is limited by your breaker.

    Now if you introduce a plug in solar setup your current is limited by your maximum breaker capacity + whatever your solar setup can generate.

    So if I'd use the specs from the article and apply it to a normal dutch home situation: 16A breaker, + 800W at 230V, which means ~3.5A = 19.5A max. which is probably still fine for short durations.

    But now some genius doesn't read the fine print and hooks up 2 or 3 on the same circuit. There is no electrician that tells him that's dangerous because it's all self installed and he doesn't know any better. And all of a sudden you are up to 26.5A and you got glowing, smoking wires in your walls...

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    Is Mastodon's Link-Previewing Overloading Servers ?
  • It is not, but a write amplification of 36704:1 is one hell of an exploitable surface.

    With that same Raspberry Pi and a single 1gbit connection you could also do 333333 post requests of 3 KB in a single second made on fake accounts with preferably a fake follower on a lot of fediverse instances. That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s. At least for as long as you can keep posting new posts for a few minutes and the servers hosting still have bandwidth. DDosing with a 'botnet' of fediverse servers/accounts made easy!

    I'm actually surprised it hasn't been tried yet now that I think about it...

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    Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
  • You might want to try out ZHA then. Its a bit younger so it doesn't support lesser known devices that z2m does and it has its quirks with other devices. But it comes almost out of the box with HA and is a 1 click install. The latest HA update brought firmware updates to the frontend, but I believe z2m already had that for a while.

    I have been running zha for half a year with some Ikea lights and some nous smart plugs and the only moment it has misbehaved is when the power to one of the router nodes went out and it stopped sending zigbee messages to certain other nodes.

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    Real-world CO2 emissions of cars are 20% higher than indicated. For plug-in hybrids they are 350% higher.
  • It's the other way around. Companies in the Netherlands lease cars for their employees here in the Netherlands. Usually for people that travel a lot with for their job or just as a bonus perk that comes with the job instead of salary. And the boss pays for all the gas and maintenance as well.

    So either take the effort to charge, or even charge at home and get refunded the electricity costs. Or just fill it up with free gas which only takes a minute. Guess which happens the most?

    The only time I saw some of those oversized and really popular Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV use a charge cable was if they wanted to take a good parking spot...

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    Totally logical and expected functionality
  • Charging from the left side isn't all that either, some macbook pro models actually become slower due to thermal throttling because charging from the left creates heat closer to the CPU. Resulting in a significant CPU slowdown.

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    How do you keep your home servers online during powercuts?
  • There are inverters that support battery backup, recharging from solar and grid power that are supposed to go between your grid tie-in and the rest of your house. Quite a ways more expensive, but the battery capacity is probably relatively cheap compared to UPS power and is essentially a backup for your entire house.

    The one I read about a while ago was a Growatt that is basically an all in one box. Can provide power from batteries, recharge from solar or grid power, feed back excess solar power to the grid, etc, you name it. And I can imagine other brands producing the same solution.

    I'm lucky enough to live in a country with almost no power cuts though. I think we have at most 1 a year for max 10 minutes. So can't say I have any experience with it myself.

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