• 102 Posts
  • 480 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • A database can be used to plug into any number of applications that run on top of it as well as be easily shared by multiple people and centrally backed up. Auditing, logging, and row and table level access controls, and other measures can be easily added.

    Excel files (or even MS Access files) as “databases” are often just people emailing around a file or accessing it from a shared drive. You end up with a split-brain situation at best and at worst you’re dealing with constant file corruption from multiple people thinking they can access it from a shared drive at the same time.

    Then you get vendor lock in and are forced to keep MS Office professional licenses because Shawn created some stupid Access “app” 10 years ago which is “THE DATABASE” and no one understands how it works.




  • I’m about that same age but am so glad we’ve largely abandoned the “www” for websites.

    On my personal project website, I have a custom listener setup to redirect people to “aarp.org” if they enter it with “www” instead of just the base domain. 😆

    server {
        listen              443 ssl;
        http2		        on;
        server_name         www.mydomain.xyz;
    
        ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/privkey.pem;
        ssl_dhparam         /etc/nginx/conf.d/tls/shared/dhparam.pem;
        ssl_protocols       TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
        ssl_session_cache   shared:SSL:10m;
        ssl_session_timeout 15m;
      
        ...
        
        location ~* {
          return 301 https://aarp.org/;
        }
    }
    





  • My X1 Carbon does now. But it used to drain to empty after a day or two even if it was turned all the way off. Drove me crazy.

    The problem ended up being the always-on USB setting in the BIOS. For some reason, even with nothing connected, that would drain the battery until it was completely flat. Once I turned that off, it’ll sleep for weeks like you said.

    OP, maybe check the BIOS settings for “Always on USB” or similar and disable that?


  • Yeah, I didn’t watch this video b/c I’m at work, but I have seen his ebike video so I’m assuming the construction is similarly well thought out.

    It’s just that all the fuses and BMSs can’t protect against a dodgy cell that decides to self-immolate. For cheap, disposable devices that are only meant to be charged 5-10 times or less and then thrown away, I’m super wary of the batteries that are chosen for those. Have seen too many things burst into flames and even expensive well cared-for devices turn into spicy pillows.





  • I learned a long time ago to never install manufacturer printer drivers. Or, at least, never install them from the provided Setup.exe.

    They’ve always installed a bunch of bloatware (HP has always been the worst but other brands are just as bad).

    If you look in the setup folder, there’s usually the raw drivers you can install from Device Manager. If the driver package is just a single .exe file, you can usually unpack it with 7zip and get at its inner contents.

    If that fails, the system-included HP LaserJet 4200 PCL driver is about as close to a universal print driver as you can find lol.



  • That guy’s got some brass ones, lol.

    I’ve upcycled disposable vape batteries for lots of projects, but never anything that draws significant amounts of current. Usually powering ESP8266/ESP32 projects that draw a couple hundred mAh at most.

    While I’m all for keeping thing out of the landfill, I would be absolutely terrified to put that many questionable quality lithium batteries into an array let alone try to draw any substantial amperage from them.