l_one's recent activity
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
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Comment on What have you been listening to this week? in ~music
l_one LinkMiracle of Sound and related songs on Pandora (when I'm in the field or driving and feel more like music than an audiobook. Recent favorites: The Tale Of Cú Chulainn The Irish RoarMiracle of Sound and related songs on Pandora (when I'm in the field or driving and feel more like music than an audiobook.
Recent favorites:
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Comment on What do you think the top three most used apps on your phone for the past week are? in ~tech
l_one LinkSmart AudioBoook Player (I listen to audiobooks constantly) Google Docs (I use it for all my work documentation when I'm doing field contract work) ChromeSmart AudioBoook Player (I listen to audiobooks constantly)
Google Docs (I use it for all my work documentation when I'm doing field contract work)
Chrome
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Comment on Iran war live: US, Tehran confirm ‘peace deal’ reached in ~society
l_one Link ParentNot surprised by this development. I will also be unsurprised if trump completely ignores it while insisting 'we totally have a deal guys' and just proceeds to give the IRGC regime everything from...Not surprised by this development. I will also be unsurprised if trump completely ignores it while insisting 'we totally have a deal guys' and just proceeds to give the IRGC regime everything from the MOU while they publicly say the deal is on hold.
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
l_one (edited )Link ParentOh, no worries, it wasn't a matter of seeking privacy, just anticipating there might be a lot we wanted to go over. But now I need to reassess an issue of personal emotional intelligence that has...Oh, no worries, it wasn't a matter of seeking privacy, just anticipating there might be a lot we wanted to go over. But now I need to reassess an issue of personal emotional intelligence that has been beaten into me by my girlfriend over the course of years (with high effort and only the most glacial of success):
"You don't always need to solve the problem. Often what is needed from you is to listen and provide comfort, a shoulder to cry on, and a sympathetic ear to listen - and then to say 'I'm sorry you are going through that' without offering solutions or things to try, because sometimes a person just needs to vent, and that is not the same thing as asking for assistance."
So, I'm sorry you are going through this (says the AuDHD person on the internet who has, roughly, the emotional intelligence of a cold unfeeling robot but emulates it from taught rote response).
With that said - I'm part of a community that includes a LOT of people who do independent repair or run their own small businesses based on such. I make a living doing what I do, they (many of them) are at different stages of building profitable repair businesses or are already there, and I can have a chat in our discord about what has worked for them and what hasn't in this field (I've actually already asked that question before I got your reply that I am replying to now with this block of text).
What I don't know is what outcome or ideal future you want for yourself in this context. If you want to keep at the work you are currently doing for the company you are currently working for, or if you had desires to do independent work, or to do both with independent stuff on the side. If you literally ONLY wanted to vent, or if you have any desire to look into and pursue options to learn more or do other repair work or etc... (options branch out further and further, etc...).
For computers and IT repair work specifically: my first decade working during and after University was computers / IT work. Support, break/fix, on-site support and housecalls, computer repair (including component repair like replacing bad caps on desktop motherboards), ISP phone support, talking with customers and building computers for them, virus removal / OS reinstall / data backup. All that IT support stuff. I do have to say that I did not see a path in that main role to making more than a modest income. There are some exceptions in the form of contract work where you go on-site for customers and provide the premium service of convenience - people DO pay much more for that, and you can make even more if you build a customer base that you have no middle-man with.
With that background and what we have previously discussed I will say that what I've shifted to (lab electronics / instrumentation) does reliably make more money per repair effort because the devices usually cost more, but also because of market stuff like supply and demand: there are A LOT of used laptops and desktops that get cycled onto the secondary market all the time from companies either upgrading hardware or going out of business, so that puts a hard upper limit on the value of any given computer, and from that the money to be made from computer repair. It DOES NOT mean you can't make a living that way, it just means you're looking at a moderate max ceiling of how much you can make per repair - not counting data recovery, that can be VERY expensive and people will pay for it. There is also the outlier right now of expensive GPU repair, which can also make good money.
For consumer electronics: many of my fellows in the YouTube Fixers community (Google will not bring up what I'm talking about, it's the name of our Discord channel) founded by JFIXX (that will come up in search just fine) do laptop repair and game console repair, and they do seek to make a living at it in different ways and to different measures of success. Some buy/repair/sell (that's what I do), some take customer repairs, some do both. There are specific repairs that I've heard are bread and butter like HDMI port and maybe also power adapter port repairs on game consoles that give a very reasonable repair-time-and-cost to profit ratio.
So that is some example of what I was thinking we could discuss. But it certainly doesn't need to be by phone, that was just a suggestion on my part if you wanted a faster back and forth to go over stuff.
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
l_one Link ParentI'd be interested in talking if you're willing. It feels like we could accomplish more in a more practical amount of time with a phone conversation (no couple-hour to 1-day pauses, a lot easier to...I'd be interested in talking if you're willing. It feels like we could accomplish more in a more practical amount of time with a phone conversation (no couple-hour to 1-day pauses, a lot easier to go back and froth with ideas and questions). Would you be interested in talking for a while? I could PM you my cell number.
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
l_one Link ParentCompletely fair. In that scope of work you can do a lot with a little (hand tools, multimeter, soldering iron, [cheap]microscope in that order), and the repair scenarios that would call for the...I'm in the trenches doing basic consumer electronics repair, so it looks like most of the stuff you process is a bit out of scope for me.
Completely fair. In that scope of work you can do a lot with a little (hand tools, multimeter, soldering iron, [cheap]microscope in that order), and the repair scenarios that would call for the use of more expensive / sophisticated / niche tools often align with the same situations in which COR is higher than RWN (Cost Of Repair / Replace With New).
I do want to give a caveat to that though - if you ignore the capital cost of said other equipment, and you also disregard the labor time needed for those kinds of repairs as another capital investment - this one in skill development - you absolutely can develop yourself to the point where you can do sophisticated repairs that 99.9% of shops / companies would consider to be 'financially unrepairable' while getting them done fast, cheap, and making profit.
Counterargument to the above is that if you have developed that level of skill you can make far more money repairing more expensive stuff than low to mid cost consumer electronics... A big part of this calculus is cost of labor. This is why I tend to see some self-taught consumer electronics repair techs of frankly incredible skill in countries and regions that are less economically developed / outright poor. Regional cost of labor is low enough, and purchasing power parity + average income is also low enough that consumer electronics can often be effectively more valuable with labor time less valuable - and people DO repair them, including performing quite sophisticated repairs, having taught themselves to do so with a combination of YouTube and the cheapest tools that can get the job done. And that leads to repair techs accustomed to unreasonable resource constraints that, frankly, demonstrate incredible skill.
Sorry, another tangent there.
I've had a hard time getting my employers to even buy soldering consumables, if that tells you anything.
YEP. 'Why would we want to spend money on you repairing stuff? You're supposed to make us money doing that, not cost us!' and 'What do you mean you need a replacement soldering cartridge? You have one right there. It get's hot doesn't it? Stop making excuses and get back to work.'
Ug.
It's been a continuous point of frustration for me how resistant the repair and recycling industry is to, you know, actual repair.
Yep. I see this with a number of companies - Keysight is one example of many. They make high end Test & Measure (they used to be higher end, in my opinion things have gone moderately downhill) that people all over use for service and repair as a fairly large percentage of their market (manufacturing is probably the highest single sector in their market, but S&R is still a big one) - and if a customer wants to, oh, I don't know, repair the instrument they purchased from Keysight then Keysight gets all 'we'll need you to sign a service contract and mail it back to us - if you open it up to try and fix it yourself you will be voiding your warranty'. Like, come on, think about what kind of people you sell your stuff to.
Aside from that example, Enshittification has infected so much of the world economy and many a company exist that view a device being fixed as a device that wasn't instead replaced with a new sale to them. Short-term profit prioritization thinking, aligning with the perverse incentives that CEO quarterly bonuses based on quarterly growth numbers result in. Why should they think with a long term view? Their incentives push them solidly at the very short-term.
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Comment on Tildes Survey #9: How optimistic are you about the future? (Results) in ~talk
l_one Link ParentYeah no kidding. I cannot properly express my depth of love for ST:TNG. It got me through high school. It fueled my passion for STEM which is a big part of what led into electronics for me. It Was...The people in charge of the economy seem way too eager to use them as a roadmap.
Yeah no kidding.
Just keep making more Star Trek: The Next Generation please.
I cannot properly express my depth of love for ST:TNG. It got me through high school. It fueled my passion for STEM which is a big part of what led into electronics for me. It Was A HOPEFUL View Of The Future And Of The Best We Could Be.
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
l_one Link ParentI typically don't give my self a plug to my store unless asked, but.. you did ask. My eBay store is here: https://www.ebay.com/usr/mehlisaa - but honestly I'm pretty slow at processing things for...- Exemplary
I typically don't give my self a plug to my store unless asked, but.. you did ask.
My eBay store is here: https://www.ebay.com/usr/mehlisaa - but honestly I'm pretty slow at processing things for sale on eBay since I'm kind of an inefficient perfectionist (must test / document every tiny thing including those 17 things that definitely don't matter to anyone or the God of Lab Electronics will judge me as wanting!!!!!!) I swear that's how my brain sabotages me sometimes.
Sorry, that way my topic-wandering way of saying I don't have a lot of my stock currently listed - which is always the case. I do as of a very recent organization project have an inventory of unprocessed stock set up as a google doc, you can look through it if you want, though it's just models and brief descriptions, not full effort listings. The use of this is you can say 'hey, does that one work and how much' and I could pull that specific item, test it, and give a price.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oJPP1vpp58g2XykFAl8ZVSYGIu6YSHL0SSwQdAfRapo/edit?usp=drive_link
I also sell on Craigslist / Facebook but those tend to be cash / in-person only. I also sell the larger/heavier items local-only due to prohibitive shipping costs. I mostly tend to do any business that involves shipping on eBay with a few exceptions, like people on EEVBlog in good standing or some of my fellow electronics YouTube people. We do have a good community here as well so I'd probably be willing to take a small risk off eBay for a fellow... Tildean? Tilderino? Tildenarian? (proceeds down rabbit hole wanting ever more absurd or hilarious names)
Or if you're interested in just having a conversation about some recommendations for what to look for on eBay in the cross-section of good and cheap, I'm not going to refuse to talk shop to try to box someone into buying something from me. I also talk about electronics a lot on my YT channel if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/@neverendingstudent/videos
If you're interested in shopping around eBay for a bench power supply: strongly recommend GW Instek. They are both good and cheap - they marketed heavily and successfully to the education market for years, so there's large volumes of their product on the secondary market, and their quality is very high. Advise going with the GPD generation and newer. My previous main bench supply was the GPD-3303S and it is outstanding. I have that specific power supply in my for-sale queue since replacing it with a newer Instek model - but you can find that same model on eBay for cheaper than I would sell mine, and while I know mine works perfectly and is dead on, I don't have much reason to think that a random one for cheaper on eBay (so long as the physical condition looks great) would be less stable and accurate than mine.
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Comment on US battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid electric vehicle bust in ~transport
l_one LinkI've been watching this happen firsthand. My main income is from my home electronics lab and auctions. I buy / refurb / test / resell lab electronics like multimeters, lab power supplies, and...I've been watching this happen firsthand.
My main income is from my home electronics lab and auctions. I buy / refurb / test / resell lab electronics like multimeters, lab power supplies, and relevant for this specific topic: resistance meters and battery analyzers.
I've been watching EV component and EV battery factories go under left and right as I see their liquidation auctions come up. I have a bunch of stuff from some of them in my queue to be processed for sale right now.
It has been disheartening because I understand the implications behind those auctions. Thousands, tens of thousands of jobs. Jobs that supported a future that was doing its part to address climate change and the challenges of now and of our future. A cleaner, more electrified transportation system.
Hopefully we can get back on track soon.
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Comment on Iran war live: US, Tehran confirm ‘peace deal’ reached in ~society
l_one Link ParentAh... there it is. An agreement to reach an agreement that I'm pretty sure neither side is interested in compromising on. So this is most likely to be a 60-day (at most... perhaps less) pause in...release of $24bn in frozen Iranian assets during the 60-day
reaching a final agreement on nuclear issues within 60 days of signing the dealAh... there it is. An agreement to reach an agreement that I'm pretty sure neither side is interested in compromising on.
So this is most likely to be a 60-day (at most... perhaps less) pause in which the US gives up leverage, Iran gets some breathing room to reconstitute and un-bury their munitions bunkers + access to their international assets, both sides? lift their respective blockades? - that wording isn't exactly clear but that is what would make sense, and traffic DOES NOT resume because the shipping industry is very risk-averse and will quite reasonably ask "so... exactly how sure are you that you found and destroyed/removed Every Last Naval Mine? And are you going to guarantee & pay out full ship-loss insurance costs if one of our tankers gets blown up? And waive us of all cleanup response obligations from the oil spill?"
Well, even with that it's still not all bad. If the 'cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon' part holds then at least people stop getting killed for a while. A while is more than nothing - and vastly more than nothing to the people actively getting shot at / bombed.
So...what did the US get out of this? Is this not like the JCPOA that was signed under the Obama admin, which Trump then tore up? What was the point of all this?
We got nothing (nothing good anyway) and there was no point as far as I can tell. A cruel narcissist conned his way into power, likes hurting others for the sake of feeling powerful, and can't stand to be told 'no'. mr orange and his buddies got plenty tough, with that constant market manipulation of 'we're about to end the war / the war will be over in 2 weeks / we're days away from a deal' - what, a couple dozen times? More? With massive buys/shorts/whatevers on oil futures and such coincidentally an hour or 15 minutes before he says that crap to the press. Every Single Time. Very subtle.
Sigh. Sorry everyone for the negativity. I'm frustrated and angry with this morass we find ourselves wading through.
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Comment on Iran war live: US, Tehran confirm ‘peace deal’ reached in ~society
l_one (edited )LinkTitle is just copied from Aljazeera. I saw this pop up but wanted a non-US based source so I went to AJ first. This is by no means any kind of guarantee, and obviously Netanyahu has a vested...Title is just copied from Aljazeera. I saw this pop up but wanted a non-US based source so I went to AJ first.
This is by no means any kind of guarantee, and obviously Netanyahu has a vested interest in keeping the war going, plus the orange is... well, an impulsive narcissist and all, so there's plenty that can go wrong here, but this is the first I've heard of Iranian sources agreeing that an agreement has been reached.
Currently set to be signed Friday in Switzerland. With all the caveats of course.
No idea what is actually in the agreement / memorandum of understanding.
Edit: I'm trying to hope against my cynical heart that this isn't another 'trump's friends enrich themselves with more market manipulation' and then hostilities resume. Pretty much my only reason for being willing to hope this even a little is that Iran is also saying there is an agreement.
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Iran war live: US, Tehran confirm ‘peace deal’ reached
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Comment on Tildes Survey #9: How optimistic are you about the future? (Results) in ~talk
l_one Link ParentI recently had a couple-hour catch-up phone conversation with a friend I hadn't spoken with in a couple years or so, and we went off on a tangent realizing that there were all these different...I recently had a couple-hour catch-up phone conversation with a friend I hadn't spoken with in a couple years or so, and we went off on a tangent realizing that there were all these different Sci-Fi Dystopia themes that we are kind of living right now.
Terminator - AI / fully autonomous weapons
Blade Runner - this was one he brought up and honestly I can't remember the specific corollary
Idiocracy somewhat comes to mind mostly based on the pursuit of the attention economy
Minority Report - surveillance companies integrating AI-enabled cameras and AI-enabled analysis software are marketing 'predictive policing tools' - so Pre-Crime
RoboCop jokingly came up - the guy DIED and they still made him show up to work on Monday. As a corporate-owned slave.There were more but I that's all I can remember. Also yes, I do believe Cyberpunk came up as a general theme.
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Comment on Tildes Survey #9: How optimistic are you about the future? (Results) in ~talk
l_one (edited )Link ParentThat is good to hear. Intended for first-order human calories or not, at the large scale there is enough inter-relation and inter-dependency in the world total calorie production that, when...They're not human food generally but the farmland around here continues to farm
That is good to hear. Intended for first-order human calories or not, at the large scale there is enough inter-relation and inter-dependency in the world total calorie production that, when looking at large scale effects it kind of all pools together.
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Comment on Tildes Survey #9: How optimistic are you about the future? (Results) in ~talk
l_one LinkAt the moment? I'm pretty far down the unoptimistic curve. Issues that are on my mind, sorted from largest to smallest impact first, then re-sorted from soonest impact to furthest-out impact....At the moment? I'm pretty far down the unoptimistic curve.
Issues that are on my mind, sorted from largest to smallest impact first, then re-sorted from soonest impact to furthest-out impact.
Largest first:
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Climate change: Loss of / change in arable farmland around the world. The current and upcoming worsening water crisis. Damage from extreme weather events of increasing frequency and severity. The upcoming positive-feedback tipping points we are approaching, and so much faster than anyone predicted / wanted to be on record saying and then risk being wrong about. Pretty well baked-in harms which we could at least stop increasing but we mostly aren't.
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The approach towards / increasing risk of World War 3 with multiple involved nuclear powers and the orange narcissist having legal nuclear authority (with the rumored but unconfirmed story that he already tried to order a nuclear strike on Iran and one of our top military officials stood up to him and outright said 'No').
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The tangled-together mess of the possible existential-level threat of AI combined with the largest financial bubble in history combined with this being the driver for the fastest accumulation of wealth and heavy-handed financial power ever seen. If my information is correct then the overwhelming driver of economic growth in the USA is the ocean of money being poured into AI. And at some point I expect that to crash and burn, with the main questions being 'when does that part start', 'how much of a crash', 'how fast of a crash', and 'how much of our economy will have been bound into the fate of the AI bubble when that crash occurs'. Expected (more) massive job loss, depression.
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The approaching food insecurity crisis due to the major disruption to and loss of fertilizer supply associated with Hormuz and the unnecessary war with Iran that orange started.
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The current energy supply disruption from Hormuz and the staggered effects different countries are looking at as strategic petroleum reserves get drawn down - they are finite and will either run out or get close enough that nations will be unwilling to go below X percent reserves and will stop releasing. I do not expect the situation with Hormuz to be 'resolved' for any value of that word anytime soon, and possibly never (the possibly never referring to a stabilization situation where there may not be active war / shooting/taking/sinking of ships but where all the factors involved keep active marine traffic to a fractional percentage of what it was going into the long-term).
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The variable levels of political 'burning of Rome' in the USA and the variable levels of bad (or some potentially good) outcomes. How much more will be degraded or outright destroyed by the time various elections occur / will the orange hitler wannabe attempt to do (insert variable levels of interference in / attempts to halt / attempts to overthrow results of elections).
In order of (likely) soonest to furthest out:
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Food insecurity. The harvest seasons in the northern hemisphere aren't too far away and the loss of / price-inaccessibility to fertilizer supply is already baked in for a majority of that if I understand correctly.
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Energy disruption. This one is somewhat variable as while it is bad, the nations involved have had and do have fair amounts of time to seek alternate sourcing / put austerity measures in place / make plans / etc. Effects should at least be staggered out and not hit everywhere all at once. Is still fairly bad for everyone though.
Tied for 3rd and 4th place due to unknown and perhaps unknowable timeline-affecting factors:
USA/political 'burning of Rome'
Approaching/increasing risk of World War 3 with potential nuclear involvement (I acknowledge that the polities involved don't actually want nuclear involvement even in the event of otherwise full-scale war with the likely idiotic exception of the orange)-
The bursting of the AI economic bubble and subsequent harms. Bubbles can keep going for a while based on human factors and momentum. Hard to know.
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Climate change effects. While we already have been experiencing, and are continuing to experience gradually more severe effects, it is still a slower progression scale on this one compared to the others listed above. It is also an item that doesn't fit well on the 'how soon does this happen' metric because it's very much not a discrete effect at a point in time but a combination of gradually-increasing effects combined with specific tipping points combined with individual extreme weather harms of variable impact.
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Comment on Front HVAC not working in minivan in ~transport
l_one Link ParentThis is true, though typically these systems are (supposed to be / matter of good engineering principles) designed so that the cheapest / easiest to replace items are spec'd to be the most likely...The caveat here is that systems like these are complex and have complex electronics to control them, so could just as easily be a failure in the electronics/board that controls the system.
This is true, though typically these systems are (supposed to be / matter of good engineering principles) designed so that the cheapest / easiest to replace items are spec'd to be the most likely to fail (in comparison to the rest of the system collectively) and keep that theme in order of cheapest/easiest to most-expensive/most-complex.
There is always random chance that a high MTBF (mean time before failure) part will die first for whatever reason, and there is also stuff like parts design succumbing to 'value engineering' (make that part shittier to save us money!) - but in general since vehicles come with warranties car companies want the costly stuff to at least be engineered to survive past the warranty period, so the 'make the cheapest part after the fuse into another fuse' principle generally holds.
I had air die on my Promaster van a while back and did some diagnostics - fuse and relay were good if I remember correctly - I pulled and tested the resistor (these aren't resistor blocks anymore but the name has carried over from ye-olden-days) and the blower motor. I couldn't find specs on the solid state device incorrectly called a resistor which I'm pretty sure was a signal-controlled PWM voltage controller, and as such I didn't know what signal to feed it in order to drive the output (and by doing that confirm if it was working or not), but the blower motor spun right up when I hooked it up to a 30 amp capable power supply in my lab.
I tried replacing the PWM driver (the resistor) and that didn't do anything. In the end I replaced the blower motor and that fixed it - even though it did work in my lab, it had aged/degraded enough that it was basically drawing too much power and was out of spec to the point the PWM module didn't output enough power to run it.
That tangent probably wasn't useful, but I just felt like sharing a related story of fixing vehicle air since it was at least on-topic.
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Comment on Front HVAC not working in minivan in ~transport
l_one LinkThat sounds like a blend door not actuating. You can search on YouTube for 'Blend Door Grand Caravan' and you're likely to get videos showing you what you'd be doing in terms of effort - you can...but the front passenger stopped switching off of the heat maybe a year ago.
That sounds like a blend door not actuating. You can search on YouTube for 'Blend Door Grand Caravan' and you're likely to get videos showing you what you'd be doing in terms of effort - you can figure out from there if you want to attempt that part.
In the past month, the front vents no longer have any air movement with the very small exception that occasionally when I switch the AC on there's a bit of a very short, light cold breeze. Even more rarely sometimes at highway speeds this breeze will continue longer.
This part sounds like your blower motor is not running and the breeze is a result of ram-scoop air pressure just from air getting pushed into the interior intake from driving speed mostly.
Blower motor could be a bad fuse, bad motor, bad motor resistor, or bad wire connection.
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Comment on We're so back in ~tildes
l_one LinkYAY! I had anxiety that Tildes was maybe gone forever for reasons I'd never get to know.YAY! I had anxiety that Tildes was maybe gone forever for reasons I'd never get to know.
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Comment on Alternatives to a straw hat in ~life.style
l_one Link ParentAgreed on OR. I have their arm sleeves and they work great. I use them while driving and working outdoors and they keep my arms from burning.Outdoor Research
Agreed on OR. I have their arm sleeves and they work great. I use them while driving and working outdoors and they keep my arms from burning.
Absolutely. I'm here for you, and good luck. I hope you figure out a way for your needs and your wants in this regard to better align.