Hacker News: gothroach

New comment by gothroach in "Google is building its own DeX: First look at Android's Desktop Mode"

gothroach — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:09:31 +0000

I think it was introduced with at least the S9+, mine has had DeX since I got it originally.

New comment by gothroach in "Six mistakes I made in my dioramas-and-felt Steam game and one I didn't"

gothroach — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:24:04 +0000

The only ways I'm aware of to download your Steam games are through the Steam desktop client or using the SteamCMD command-line client.

Edit: I think people really sleep on SteamCMD, I really like using it.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

New comment by gothroach in "Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls"

gothroach — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:09:43 +0000

I looked through the material, but I'm still at a loss how this is different than any recent battery/inverter combination like Ecoflow/Jackery/etc or a UPS with an app. I'm an electrician, and very in to new electrical products but this one just makes me wonder how it's different.

New comment by gothroach in "Ryugu asteroid sample colonized by terrestrial life despite strict control"

gothroach — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 15:46:47 +0000

I absolutely love how once things get down to 1 AWG they realized they had a problem and just started adding zeros. Then that got a bit silly, so when they reached 4/0 AWG they switched to KCMIL measurements and the numbers start going up.

New comment by gothroach in "How good are American roads?"

gothroach — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:23:24 +0000

Cody's Lab did a video with some experiments collecting and refining road dust. As I recall, he did manage to obtain a small bead of platinum-group metals but it didn't appear to be economically viable at least at a small scale.

New comment by gothroach in "Title drops in movies"

gothroach — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:05:25 +0000

Does this not take in to account lyrics in musical movies? I looked up Across the Universe and it reported zero name drops despite there being at least a dozen.

New comment by gothroach in "PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx"

gothroach — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:33:48 +0000

I haven't tried the ESP32-H2 or ESP32-C6 yet, but they have 802.15.4 radios so they can be used with Zigbee or Threads (plus WiFi 6 on the C6). I definitely am eager to play around with one, most of my current projects have been on the ESP32-C3.

New comment by gothroach in "Show HN: I built a 4000 watt solar array on top of my Tesla (AMA)"

gothroach — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 07:00:31 +0000

I do a lot with solar for work, and had a few questions immediately. Are the Renology panels what you had access to chosen for a specific purpose? Some of the panels we use for high efficiency jobs are 400+ watts at a size closer to your 200w panels than your 440w panels. Also, have you considered using any type of optimizer or per-panel MPPT? Those can have a significant impact on real-world performance in my experience, especially in cases of shading or uneven panel soiling. With high efficiency panels, panel optimizers, and series stringing you could likely get to DC charging voltages (although at paltry amperage).

New comment by gothroach in "Show HN: Watering my Christmas tree with ESPHome"

gothroach — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 02:50:04 +0000

I also built something along these lines about three years ago and use it every year. I started off with a stainless steel hall effect float switch and it's lasted so far, on its fourth year. I don't have a pump for my water, I use my RO system as a source and a solenoid as a valve. I do use a peristaltic pump to meter out Christmas tree preservative according to the readings from a flow meter on the water side though. It's worked wonderfully, even when changing tree stands.

New comment by gothroach in "Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants"

gothroach — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:18:55 +0000

IGBT's changed power conversion as we know it!

New comment by gothroach in "Apple plans to equip MacBooks with in-house cellular modems"

gothroach — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 20:00:16 +0000

Depends on the type of device you're talking about. The company I work for installs batteries and solar on homes as part of its business and we were surprised to find cell modems starting to come installed inside the battery system we use most often - with no notice to us or apparent change in how the system operates. It's not for customer-accessible statistics/usage information, those still require a hardwired connection. We haven't been able to get a good answer from the company about why they started being installed.

New comment by gothroach in "FSB arrests REvil ransomware gang members"

gothroach — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 16:22:36 +0000

I've heard it said both ways on the news today, but I'm leaning towards R-Evil.

New comment by gothroach in "Comcast Is Down"

gothroach — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 06:44:52 +0000

In Sonoma County Comcast Business is down. T-Mobile also seems to be having issues.

By the way, take a look at the PurpleAir map - you can get an idea of the size and spread of the outage by the number of offline air quality sensors. Works for power outages too!

New comment by gothroach in "On YouTube’s recommendation system"

gothroach — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 18:06:23 +0000

When you select not interested, it gives the option of saying it's either because you already watched the video or that you don't like the channel. I don't know quite why they keep recommending videos I've watched recently, but at least telling YouTube I've seen a video (...) prevents it from spamming my recommendations.

New comment by gothroach in "Ask HN: Can anyone in the medical device/software industry explain redundancies?"

gothroach — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 23:04:32 +0000

5aq3rr

New comment by gothroach in "The Wiretrustee SATA Pi board is a true SATA NAS"

gothroach — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:20:29 +0000

I use an i3-4370 with 32G of ECC in a Supermicro 4u case as my ZFS NAS - I got it new for the purpose and it's still running strong seven years later. The only changes I've made have been doubling the RAM from 16G, adding in new storage as needed, and adding a dual 10gbit card when I upgraded my network.

I tried a couple of 10gbit cards, but ended up getting a half dozen used Intel X520-DA2 cards for dirt cheap. I've not had any issue with these, and my NAS can easily saturate at least one link. The cards have been reliable in every machine I've tried and can be found for $75-100 - not too bad for dual port 10gbit!

As a side note, I was surprised to find that i3 supports ECC.

New comment by gothroach in "My MacBook Air M1 is dead"

gothroach — Thu, 06 May 2021 23:43:27 +0000

I saw him mention it at the end of this article, but the way the link was presented caused me to lose any interest in clicking it. Is it a story worth reading?

New comment by gothroach in "Electricity over $900/MWh in most of Western US now"

gothroach — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 03:50:50 +0000

I'm on T3 with an excessive use surcharge, so I'm closer to 45 cents here in the North Bay.

New comment by gothroach in "Amazon Sidewalk"

gothroach — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:13:16 +0000

I just checked, it's off by default for me currently. Maybe they'll change the default in the near future.

New comment by gothroach in "Google disabled my husband's account"

gothroach — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 19:20:51 +0000

It's definitely not the cheapest option, but if you don't have a large storage requirement, 25 Mail St. is a good option. I host my own personal email, but have set a couple clients up with 25 Mail St. and it's been excellent. By far the best part is the support - all support is done by the engineers instead of customer support staff following a script. They're incredibly transparent about things like support statistics, and are understandably proud of their metrics. The main downside is the low amount of storage offered for the price.

It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.