I’ve got one of those KeepConnect smart plugs which monitors a few different external servers and their own cloud, and automatically power cycles its outlet if things don’t work. They’ve damn near doubled in price since I’ve bought mine but it does work very well for me. Annual fee is reasonable too.

I could build something similar but I have too many projects as it is, and I feel I’d be fiddling with it endlessly just because I can. This is literally set and forget and in the last 2y it’s cycled the outlet 48 times, most of them in the middle of the night, presumably with my cable provider maintenance windows.

Exactly this. I use Shelly relays in the switch boxes and use the physical switch as an input to the Shelly relay. I have a couple AliExpress zigbee relays too that work well.

The trick is with three/four way switches where the smart relay needs continuous power and to be physically located at the end of the chain where power is actually switched to the light or outlet. Took me a while to figure that out but an SPDT relay with 120V coil solves that. The problem is space: fitting the relay to provide continuous power to the smart relay and the smart relay itself into a standard junction box with a physical switch and all the usual mess of wiring is not easy.

Interesting; I thought this worked be a single high power laser (or a few) with galvanometers for targeting.

Would love to learn more about how it’s really done (as opposed to how I imagine it’d be done).

EE (specifically embedded systems) here: just how much power do you need to zap a weed effectively? I would’ve thought a 40W laser would have been more than enough, and then scale that up for a hundred acres.

only solar would be tough, but a small EV battery with a large panel in the sun for 12h seems like it’d be a lot of juice to run WeedZapper2000 with a topping off charge overnight, no?

The spirit of the law is a very real thing and is taken into account by judges all the time.

I don’t understand the end game here. What possible benefit is there to RFK or the federal government to reject sound science? I don’t see a profit motive, I don’t see a grift that’d be “worth” the deaths… it’s not like ivermectin is something you could profit off of… why?

“I moderate heavily. If someone is rude or abusive, their comment isn’t published. Unless it’s really funny.” :-)

ssh -D8080 myserver and then use any of the proxy extensions (i like proxyswitchy omega I think it’s called). Also works with tsocks or anything that can use a SOCKS5 proxy, and as an added bonus, it’ll resolve DNS through the proxy as well.

I’ve been using the -L2500:localhost:25 -L14300:localhost:143 trick to access my personal email without leaking anything outside of the ssh tunnel for years, and things like sslh and corkscrew allow me to get around/through draconian corporate IT policies with almost 100% success.

The last trick I have is iodine which can tunnel traffic through DNS. If you can’t get a direct connection to the iodine endpoint it can be damn slow, but if you gotta get through it can be a godsend.

Gang of Four?

oh I wasn’t talking about storage media. I’m talking about rack servers, switches, storage arrays (with new drives), etc., etc… The older hardware can wear out/break (I used to do MTTF/MIL-HDBK-217 calculations for avionics) but generally speaking it’s got a lot of life left in it by the time it hits the surplus market. It’s also usually designed with redundancies/failover mechanisms which means you don’t have to bodge together inferior solutions.

I’ve never seen a window AC with mechanical knobs not cycle the compressor when it hits the temperature set by its thermostat. The fan might run 24/7 but the compressor? How could it possibly regulate temperature otherwise?

Gotta see some evidence on that claim. Older stuff is more power hungry no doubt about it, but especially old data centre equipment is waaay more reliable and built with some very nice creature comforts.

This.

Almost all of my gear is bought used: switches, server, even memory. My main server is an old Dell C6100 blade server I got for $250. My disk array is a 12-bay SAN that I found for $50 and took a chance on being able to get it working. It’s power hungry but it’s got redundant everything and I have spare parts on the shelf next to it.

I’ve been branching into ARM servers a little and right now I’ve got an RK3588 board with 32G of RAM. That’s new (and expensive for me) but I got a fibre channel array for $20 that I’m going to try to make work with it. $8 FC HBA and a $12 cable along with a $30 m2-to-PCIe adapter intended for eGPUs. I’m not going for speed here, but used data centre equipment is nice and some of it is dirt cheap because it’s too slow for “real” work.

Monitor the current with the smart plug. When you want to turn it off, wait for the current to drop for a few minutes (this means the compressor is off/unloaded) then power off the outlet.

Might be an idea.

Very weird; I’m in twentynine palms today (visiting Joshua Tree and then just got back from stargazing) and saw/heard nothing about this. Drove through Palm Springs late this morning to get here.

What a senseless tragedy. I hope for swift justice for the perpetrators and peace for the victims.

What? You have to show ID art the ticket counter or kiosk to get your boarding pass. Security usually only looks at the boarding pass, then you have to show ID at the gate. That’s how it’s been in Canada as long as I can remember.

My car is a diesel. I believe catalytic converters are the usual fare for gasoline engines.

and I like how you’re trying to steer the conversation in exactly the same way but in a different direction.

I mean seriously, you call the hypothetical person in some low level clerical/administrative role a fascist because they won’t quit because it’s simply not that easy to do so, yet in the same breath you say “I totally have so much power as an individual to drive the piss ass politics in a country of 330 million” – hypocrite much?

It’s just like the DEF tanks on 18 wheelers. I buy a 10L jug of it from Walmart for something like $10. In my trunk there’s a panel you remove and under it there’s a small cap very similar to the gas cap. Remove that, hook up the DEF bottle hose (the bottles come with a 12-15" corrugated hose) and very slowly pour it in. You don’t want to spill that stuff, it’s nasty not because it’s urea, but because when it dries it kind of crystallizes and makes a real bloody awful mess.

Replace the cap, replace the panel cover, close the trunk and you’re done for another 9-15mos.

It’s my understanding that the cheat was in all TDI models, but the smaller Jetta was particularly bad because it didn’t have a urea system and the fix for that model was to retrofit one. My Passat may have needed a more robust urea injector and not just software, but I can’t remember now. Either way on my year/model the fix was barely noticeable.