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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devHamster IT
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    15 hours ago

    Mice used to have a mechanical ball in the bottom. You needed to remove it periodically to clean out the gunk that formed on the rollers. When optical mice appeared, they steadily replaced the old style. It became an IT joke. Mice with balls were male. Optical mice were female.



  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoEurope@feddit.orgUK Government will allow "Plug-In Solar" Panels
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    16 hours ago

    The UK plug is one of the best around. It’s only downside is that it’s chunky. By putting the fuse in the plug, the protection can be customised to what is attached.

    It also is designed to be almost impossible to fall out of a wall socket. As well as mandating the pin connection order and safety shielding. The sockets are also gated, stopping children sticking stuff into them.

    Even internally they are well designed. The live wire is the weakest link. If pulled, that will tend to fail first. It will, however be held internally by the neutral and earth wires. The earth will be the last to fail.

    The side entry also means that the plug locks into place when the cable is pulled. If the plug or socket fails catastrophically, the earth pin will be the last to pull loose.


  • 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.







  • There’s some evidence that mammals never lost the ability. Unfortunately, our scarring response is massively faster and locks wounds down.

    A few years back, they engineered mice to lack a gene, to find out what it did. Initially, someone got in trouble for not properly marking the modified mice (via holes in their ears). They later discovered the holes healed completely, including regenerating fur etc.

    Unfortunately, it also makes recovery from larger wounds difficult, since without a scarring response they don’t close quickly.








  • 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.