• 55 Posts
  • 182 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle



  • High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

    I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

    I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.



  • The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I’m not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.

    It’s still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.

    It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.


  • I haven’t done any channel optimisation so far, I probably should do. I have the P version of the Sonoff Zigbee dongle, I haven’t tried the E version.

    I’ve also been careful with picking router devices. I’ve tried to avoid router devices that have poor reported compatibility with Aqara. There is a page/thread somewhere online where people were compiling lists of devices that do or don’t play nice with Aqara. IKEA devices apparently work very well with Aqara, I’ve been using their smart plugs wherever I can.

    My Zigbee network also improved a lot when I set up some IKEA plugs in the loft. My house also has thick walls, but it seems Zigbee signal can propagate more easily through ceilings/floors.

    Using quality brand batteries also seems to help a bit, at least from a battery life point of view.


  • Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

    Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

    CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

    There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

    All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

    Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.















  • I’ve never found Screen Time all that useful, for the same reason as the article - it can’t distinguish good usage from bad usage. Screen Time only counts time - but it can’t tell which minutes is doomscrolling and which are used more positively.

    Maybe that’s an application for Apple Intelligence, although there would be some pretty big privacy issues there.

    Screen Time is also not helped by only working on Apple devices. It can’t account for time spent using using non Apple devices like TVs, consoles, PCs with other operating systems etc. it might have been more useful if there was an external API screen time software for other platforms could report to.