WaterWaiver

I don’t like adaptors, as they almost always noticeably reduce audio quality.

Huh? 3.5mm to 6.35mm adapters, the small bits of metal and plastic, or are you talking about something else?

I wouldn’t say placebo. It’s definitely doing something.

I would say this is still a placebo. Placebos always still do something. A sugar pill tastes sweet and modifies the sugar levels in your blood. The important questions are validity and effectiveness, not whether or not it does something.

Balanced audio will not eliminate noise in most of the circumstances where a headphone user hears noise. There are far more likely sources (the source file itself, DAC limitations, audio amp limitations, external sound from their environment, etc). It will help in some very specific circumstances, but that's like trying to sell snow chains to all car owners on the planet because you can claim that they improve traction.

If you do work in an environment where changing to balanced headphone signalling helps... why are you working with your head inside an RF hazard zone?

(From page): However, balanced audio does a better job of eliminating noise, should it exist in your signal. In a case where extraneous noise is present

Misleading.

Noise exists in all signals. Balanced audio only "does a better job" in circumstances other than what this product is being sold for. Discussing this at all gives it false merit anyway.

EDIT: Giving this some further thought: balanced and unbalanced signalling is mostly moot when you're an isolated device with one cable attached. From an RF standpoint you're not forming both halves of an antenna (dipole or monopole+ground). Electrically they both look extremely similar in this scenario. Your partially conductive human arms waving around will probably couple to RF noise better than the headphone cable.

Slashdot.org

Don't forget its fork, https://soylentnews.org

Yes it's possible to run them without resistors if you put them all in series and use a current limited power supply. That's how some LED lighting products do it, just not common LED strips.

Common LED strips are designed for convenience over efficiency. You feed them 12V and you can cut them to any shorter length without worry. You can't do that as easily with series configurations.

and a constant current supply will suffice for several strips of series LEDs in parallel.

Yes and no. I've seen lots of series-parallel products fail with blown LEDs.

For parallel LEDs to work you need three things:

1. Very well matched LEDs.
2. Shared heatsinking, so one LED getting hot shares some of its heat with its neighbours.
3. Reasonable driving level. The more power you put into the LEDs the worse it gets.

These 3 things cost money so they often get skimped.

The LEDs will end up in an autonomous greenhouse where power efficiency is important.

Removing the resistors of a white 12V LED strip will (at best, in theory) increase your efficiency by 25%.

Choosing to use more LEDs and driving them at lower power levels might increase your efficiency even more than this. In 2024 you should be able to get well over 100 lumens per watt, but many LED strips overdrive the LEDs, dramatically lowering their efficiency. LED light output versus power input curves are very nonlinear, you get decreasing returns of light the more power you put in.

autonomous greenhouse

What are you growing? Sounds suspicious. Please don't do anything illegal.

If your greenhouse is anything larger than a small test then please instead proper fire detection and suppression systems. Don't get people hurt.

A good search term is "SSD over-provisioning"

The file size discrepancy is usually due to 1000 vs 1024

No, that's something else entirely. It doesn't matter what measurement system you use, the drive juggles more sectors than your OS can see.

but filling the drive with random data until its full should wipe the drive.

Only if you assume people can't access the reserved/unallocated/over-provisioned sectors. If you are only worried about small thieves then this might not be an issue. If you're handling sensitive data (like medical records for other people or anything with sensitive passwords) then it's completely inadequate to leave any form of data anywhere on the disk.

I assume you're joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.

The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).

Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that's vendor specific, not documented and I don't think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).

Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.

(Very late reply) it looks like some internal voxelisation or mesh resolution has been set too rough. Have you changed "Slice resolution" (default 0) or "G-code resolution" (default 0.0125)?

sandboxes UWP app

UWP isn't sandboxing law, it's Microsoft business policy, the sands will shift at a later date.

Probably Windows update running in the background. On laptops it's a particularly garbage experience (fan spins up & runs hot as you say) with no communication until it's "done". If you have deigned not to turn on Windows for a while (tisk tisk) then it might require multiple reboots and a forced fullscreen blue questioning about why you're not using OneDrive and sharing more information (OOBE).

Are they still doing the MoDeRn standby thing where windows update runs when your laptop is "in standby" in your bag?

My approach to handling Windows Update is to use my imagination. You're in an alternative dimension where a medieval super-powerful church-state controls technology. Windows update is a regular procedure required to obtain the necessary computing purity and state that has been deemed appropriate for your status. Those who choose to ford their own lazy path without it risk requiring the penance of reinstallation, or even worse, revocation. An occasional skip of your sessions is tolerated, but if you no longer habitually open your laptop for a few hours each morning then you will develop the symptoms.

You could probably increase the 82K and 10K resistors to be much bigger (by a factor of 10x or maybe even 100x). Lookup the input impedance for the ADC of your model of ATmega, as long as it's >10x the size of your resistors then your circuit will probably be accurate enough.

A couple more things to keep in mind:

• a fresh alkaline 9V battery is actually 9.6V or more, not 9V.
• 9V battery voltages droop noticeably when under load because of their high internal resistance. Make sure to measure under the same conditions.

Exactly this. Second hand thinkpads are stupidly cheap -- I'm currently typing on my $180AUD laptop. I never buy new.