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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.

    Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!












  • Is that true though? As in, is it really that dangerous? It seems that you’ll dissipate power equal to the inefficiency times the nominal charging power, so something like 5V x 2A x inefficiency (inefficiency being 1-efficiency), which will probably be of order a watt.

    I can use my car battery to charge itself without any issues — I just plug the red terminal to itself, and same with the black, which is to say, a battery is always connected in a way that “charges itself.”

    I think the key is that the battery probably isn’t really playing a big role in OOP’s setup — electricity doesn’t “go through the battery,” it just goes from the charging input to the power output circuits, with the additional power (due to inefficiency) being provided by the battery.


  • I’m not sure though — the power output and the charging input are both regulated and (almost certainly) current limited. So I think (not positive…) that you’re basically dissipating your power in the inefficiency the charging and output circuits, with this power coming from the battery.

    The inefficiency should (I think…) just be the round-trip inefficiency of the charging/discharging of your power bank — this should be way, way less than the short-circuit power dissipation.

    The simplest toy model is to take a battery and try to charge itself. So you put jumpers on the + terminal and you connect those to the + terminal, and same for - (charging is + to +, NOT + to -). But this is silly because you’ve just attached a loop of wire to your terminals, which is equivalent to doing nothing. With charging circuits in between things get much more complicated, but I’m not sure if it goes full catastrophic short…


  • For 75kg (roughly average South Korean male weight) and 7" step height (standard in the US I think, not sure about Korea), this is about 0.13kJ/step.

    By coincidence, the human metabolic efficiency is (roughly) the same as the conversion between kJ and food (kilo)calories, meaning this would be (very roughly) 0.1 calories/step.

    Not much, given a single French fry is maybe 5-10 calories. But it’s better than nothing!


  • Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.

    They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.