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Not sure what you mean by work full time. Get a job working for someone else 40 hours a week for a lousy $10 or $15 an hour? I was done with that over 30 years ago. The 15 or 20 hours a month I'm doing now working from home is about as much work as I care to do. I want to go back to living again...

Thanks all for the condolences. The hardest part, namely the funeral and burial, is over. Once I feel myself again, I'll easily go back to doing projects to fill my uncommitted time. I'm also working about 15 to 20 hours a month on a new project for my friend who owns the taximeter shop. I...

As some of you may know, I've been care taking for my mother for about the last decade. Things got more involved when she stopped walking about 6 years ago. I had to bathe her, put her on the toilet, move her from her bed to her recliner, and so forth. I semi-retired in 2018, both to take care...

Why would you need to work 900 years? People can usually save enough to retire on by their 60s. The very point of living longer is so you have a more years without working.

I think splitting the country into the two coasts, and middle America, would be the best outcome. Let them have their theocracy, so long as it doesn't come to where I live. I'll feel sorry for anyone who lives there, but hopefully they'll still be free to leave. It would be more than a bit...

Regardless of whatever media you choose, it's worth noting that degradation slows down dramatically at lower temperatures. Put the media in a sealed bag to avoid condensation, then stick in the freezer. If it was good for, say, 20 years at room temperature, it might be good centuries later in...

It boils down to where I'd feel comfortable. I'm a megacity person who gets around by walking, cycling, and public transit. I like big city life in general. Outside of NYC, there's no where in the US I'd really want to live. The closest analogue to NYC are Asian megacities like those in China...

I'm curious what they would have against retiring in the country with your own source of income. I get all the other objections. The Netherlands has a great bike network, among other things. If Trump gets a second term, I'm seriously considering leaving the country. No idea where I would go...

I guess it'll be OK. We're not talking about high power level per square mm like a microprocessor. Like you said, anything is better than air. The thermal paste probably isn't that much worse than many thermal pads anyway.

How much of a gap? Heat sink compound is generally designed to be used only to fill very thin gaps on the order of a few thousandths of an inch. If used in thicker layers, there might be too much thermal impedance.

It's highly likely it'll still work. Just take the board out of the enclosure and let it dry thoroughly for a few days. Electronics and water are mainly a problem if they sit in water for more than a few days. A wash/rinse cycle doesn't qualify. That's not long enough for the water to start to...

I'm used to °C for all my engineering work. I just don't have an instinctual grasp of it as it relates to weather. If someone tells me it's 20 outside, I expect to be freezing unless I'm wearing a few layers. I have to convert C to F in my head to get an idea of the temps I'm dealing with. Also...

Just as an aside I've been using metric on my bike computers for years. The higher number just sounds better. I can tell people I was cruising at 35, or bombed down a hill at 60. Sounds much better than 22 and 37, respectively. Can't get used to metric for temps though. It still sounds strange...

Or the grid needs to be upgraded to handle them, often at great expense. It's a chicken or egg thing. Until more people own EVs, in many places the math just won't work out for charging stations. Provided you can charge at home, for most EV use they're not needed anyway. You'll be seeing them...

I know that. A 240VAC, 30A dryer outlet is a lot more practical for home EV charging, assuming your EV is compatible with it.

Or pass an extension cord out the window.

Pretty much every business fudges its numbers. That's why it's better to look at independent, real world data, like in the article I linked to. Here's another: Tesla Model 3 Owners Get Candid About LFP Battery Health And Degradation Can you charge where you live? For most EV owners most of...

Except real world date shows the battery may well outlast the rest of the vehicle: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/researchers-surprising-discovery-lifespan-ev-110000330.html Also, there are two types of batteries being used in EVs now. The first type is regular nickel cobalt lithium ion (the...

Obviously it would need to be done in an isolated area.

Have you ever tried a shotgun or machine gun? That would probably be the most dramatic way to destroy a drive short of explosives.

Glad to hear he's alive and well, and thanks for reaching out to him.

He passed away? Or you're simply using "late" to mean it's been a while since he's been around?

Maybe the 4TB are more reliable? Yes, it seems strange they didn't upgrade to larger drives. They must have run the numbers and found some reason to stick with the older drives.

They are practically dead for anything but data centers, and a handful of home users with huge storage needs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/08/03/death-of-the-hard-disk-could-come-sooner-than-we-thought/?sh=616e8e2c146b However, with further evidence of SSDs showing greater...

Well, SSDs are getting a lot cheaper. We're at around $30/TB for the commodity stuff. Commodity HDDs are maybe only half that at this point, but SSDs are falling in price faster than HDDs. Probably only a matter of a year or two before SSDs get cheaper than HDDs. The highest capacity stuff...

Does anyone still even use a fax these days?

Yeah, I got XP to use over 4GB in a VM using some components from Windows Server 2003, but the exact same build would crash before booting on a real machine, presumably due to driver issues. In the end as you said, XP generally works fine with 2GB anyway. 3GB is just gravy. I think I went that...

I can't help much on the hardware part but I had an Athlon XP system and Windows XP SP3 running with 3GB, so basically XP will use whatever RAM you throw at it. Going beyond 3GB makes little sense though even if your M/B could handle it. With some of the addresses reserved for hardware, you'll...

You have to be very careful here. Strictly speaking, most of the LED retrofits are illegal. The issue is that the optics in your headlights are designed to work with the very specific light pattern emitted by the OEM halogen bulb. Most LED retrofits can't mimic this enough to meet specs. The end...

One of my concerns would be the drives failing to work when you need them. Anything second hand could be heavily used. Also, with drives being mechanical devices if they sit unused for a while they might not work. For safety reasons, I'd probably want 2 or 3 drives on hand just in case of...

The earlier ones, which cost a few bucks each, were. By the time they became commodity items of course reliability suffered. In any case, it's moot now given how useless they are for any kind of back up. I haven't had a floppy drive on my main machine for the better part of a decade.

I thought tape was obsolete like a decade ago. As for reliability, weren't 3.5" floppies the pinnacle of reliability, and it's been all downhill ever since? Granted, the capacity made them useless for most backups even 2 decades ago but with magnetic bits that large they're probably immune to a...

The irony here is the same billionaires who are happy to cut costs and safety in the name of profit if it only affects average people ended up a victim of their own philosophy. Maybe they'll finally see the fallacy of profits above all else. I have a feeling you're not going to see much of this...

Definitely. The high temperatures in a UPS cook the heck out of batteries.

Definitely not A123 cells. Probably China cells. That said, the battery might still be OK. I just revived 2 old Craftsman power screwdrivers which had dead NiCd batteries using A123 cells I got in 2006. I had to add an LiFePO4 charging board and USB C board, but now they work great, and are USB...

Correct that lead-acid is rated at C/20. Most likely that battery is still good for another year, at least. That's where the A123 26650 cells come in. 50A continuous discharge, 120A pulse discharge. Looks like 2 of these can fit in a 2.56" width. Put them in a 4S2P arrangement and you get 100A...

It's already at 83% capacity. Generally 80% is when it's time to consider taking a battery out of service. I guess ~3 years is pretty much the lifetime for SLA batteries in UPS service. BTW, LiFePO4 would probably hold 12.8 to 13.2 volts for most of the discharge. The nice thing about LiFePO4...

Basically, the UPS tells me the battery is crap when the red "no battery" light starts flashing. At that point when I test the battery it's pretty much an open circuit. Sadly, this seemed to happen within 3 years almost all the time. Doing a capacity test on a battery every few months won't...

Throughout history kids have been exposed to "adult" stuff, yet somehow managed to deal with it. To me it's a losing battle trying to sanitize the world. If anything, it's better if kids grow up knowing the world isn't all unicorns and fairies and castles. At least they won't be stunned when...

Yeah, but they're going for minimum weight, plus the bikes are new and constantly inspected. It's one thing to trust a carbon fiber bike under those conditions, versus after 25K miles on NYC's potholed streets.

One reason I've avoided carbon fiber bikes is their failure mode. Unlike metal frames which bend a lot before they break, giving you some warning, carbon fiber tends to just suddenly shatter when it fails. Basically, your bike is fine one second, then in pieces the next. There's an entire...

I might be OK going down in a military sub but I wouldn't have gotten in something like this if you paid me a million dollars. The only solace is they probably died within milliseconds, before any pain signals could reach their brains, or they had a chance to even realize what was happening. Not...

Speaking of things running always, I took this today: It's apparently been at least 206 days since our last power blip, probably longer. Last time I may have rebooted after installing software, not because of any power outages. The electricity here is pretty reliable. Only two causes of...

Kind of what I was thinking. If you have backup generators, a UPS like I described, which has a few minutes run time, is perfect. That's more than enough to tide you over until the generators kick in.

The use case for what I describe wouldn't be to execute a shut down. Rather, it's to simply carry you through brief power interruptions lasting usually only a few seconds. Sort of like when your lights blink off, then come back on not long after. It's still annoying in that lots of devices have...

Easy answer is the marketing people would have a hard time selling a UPS which only lasts for a few minutes at best. Most people are idiots who look only at bigger numbers, even though in many situations a UPS which lasts a 1 to 5 minutes would cover 99% of power interruptions. You could even...

In my personal experience lead acid batteries are sh*t after 2 or 3 years. That's one reason I stopped bothering with UPSes. Besides the cost, it's creating more electronic waste. And we almost never have power outages lasting more than a few seconds*. To me LiFePO4 are the only type of battery...

Well, I'll try swapping the old transformer-based AC adapter with a more modern switch mode wall wart. If the house wiring is acting as an antenna of sorts, hopefully the more modern power supply has enough filtering to keep any stray RF signals out. Now I'll just see if I get the chatter again...

I've had an intermittent problem for months, possibly longer, which has been driving me crazy. At random times I get chatter on my speakers (cheap, generic external speakers I've had for years). It sounds like the kind of chatter you might hear on emergency frequencies like police, fire...

I remember from back in my days playing with PCs of that era that most didn't take the 512MB sticks. I have an old Pentium II system which actually has 4 memory slots (most MBs then had 2 or 3). At least I could max out the memory on that system at 1 GB, not 768 MB. I tried the 512MB sticks in...