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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • A lot of vehicles have a beam dip adjuster in the cab. Mine pops out when I press the center of the light control selector.

    Officially, they are to correct for a heavy load in the back. Unofficially, if you tweak them, you can flip between longer range, and polite as required.

    If you watch your lights, there should be a fairly sharp cut-off at the top of their coverage. If that line ever hits a window or mirror, it will look like you are flashing them. If it’s too high, either fix it yourself (generally quite easy) or get it fixed.




  • It was a mountain out of a molehill situation. Basically, brother toner cartridges can do an internal calibration to fix minor alignment issues. For off brand toner, it needs to be done manually. It had been that way for a while. The original author just got some particularly misaligned cartridges and “discovered” this.

    Other than that, I’ve seen no signs of enshitifcation from Brother. I ended up buying a brother colour laser not long afterwards, and have been quite happy so far.




  • I had a chat about this with a friend who works for the national grid (UK).

    Apparently the problem is keeping the grid balanced and stable. Basically, the grid struggles to react fast, so they plan ahead. Things like large scale solar can provide predictions on output. Home solar can’t.

    When clouds pass over an area it can cause slumps and surges in the local grid. The more home solar, the worse it gets. The current grid is designed to work top down, with predictable changes in demand. It needs upgrading to deal with large scale bidirectional flows.

    The plug in units are (potentially) even more ropey. If used properly, they are no worse than normal home solar. Unfortunately, being cheaper, there are worries over the microinverters not shutting down. Either due to the manufacturer cheaping out, or turning on an “off grid” mode.

    There are also worries about overloading household circuits. Back feeding bypasses the household circuit breakers and RCDs. They could overload wall wiring and cause fires, or stop an RCD tripping, allowing for a person to be shocked.

    I don’t know how much this would apply to the American Grid, but I would imagine it would be worse. Your grid is older and larger. You also use 120VAC which makes the current overload issue a lot worse.



  • As a parent, an extra layer of protection would be a positive. Balancing everything, and not leaving holes is hard enough, and I’ve yet to deal with the teenage phase.

    As the same time, as a Netizen, the risk of abuse to datamine me is FAR too great.

    The only way I would accept it is via zero knowledge proof type tokens. I can prove I am of age, but nothing more about me can be determined by any party.

    The current laws seem aimed at using “protect the children” to remove anonymity from the web, and are a data miner’s wet dream.






  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldReddit car crains at it again
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    2 months ago

    A line I’ve used before is “It won’t be your fault, but it will be your problem.”

    Pedestrians should be able to walk on the roads. It should be down to cars to not hit them. However, when they screw up. The car owner has a dented car, you have shatter bones and organs.

    It’s against the grain here, but my personal view is that all school kits should be given a family size pack of high Vis strap vests and taught the risks. It’s amazing how effective an educated 8 year old can be at changing behaviours.


  • There is always the option for gorilla node deployment. They need very little power, so solar etc is an option, and the hardware is relatively cheap.

    A cheap drone could easily place nodes in hard to reach locations e.g. top of telephone poles. You now have an anonymous node that is trivial to connect to but harder to disable.

    It’s far from perfect, but a good option.

    I also now have the image of a node built into a drone. Then it bolting, like a startled sparrow, when they try to remove it…