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TubeSync: Sync YouTube playlists offline. Because YT Music is too costly
  • Does it download the actual music tracks from youtube-music, or does YouTube helpfully provide the video version of the music?

    I've used a few downloaders and it seems these days that every music video is a whole "production" with 30 seconds of dialogue and intro before the actual music starts, or there's background noise over the first dozen bars (because the artist is in a cafe or car park or on the train in the clip) and all of that is just a bit tedious when listening to the audio only.

  • Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash
  • You've got the motive back to front.

    yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs

    In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.

    Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.

    A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.

    Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.

  • Is it just me or do you guys miss these type of skeuomorphic icons?
  • Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

    Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

    But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you're trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

    Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

    But I don't need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my "click the button" mental command as a background process.

  • Need help bypassing login screen without compromising machine security
  • Is there any sort of way to get the best of both worlds? to have the PC be able to go from power button to jellyfin server started and still have some measure of security?

    Windows with auto login? Not really. That is, anyone with a mouse + keyboard locally can get in there.

    You can set up jellyfin to run as a windows service and then it should auto start and run as a particular user without you having to log in. Have a look in the "advanced" section in the jellyfin docs.

  • The [Australian] government plans to ban under-16s from social media platforms.
  • you gotta indoctrinate them while they're young & impressionable so that they will more easily accept your biases as reality;

    Lol and social media companies are just such complete white knights too and would never engage in such tactics.

  • Deleted
    Language learning models, not AI, are beneficial to society
  • Train your LLM better.

    You didn't go to the library in the '80s and watch a DVD of a documentary to get the information you wanted.

    So this is the concern I have with letting LLMs do all the heavy lifting. You've put in a nice summary of how we should be using LLMs and then here's a glaring anachronism. So now that I've spotted that, should I take any credence in whatever else you've said?

  • How much money would someone have to pay you to sleep in a scratchy wool sweater for the rest of your life?
  • You people are underselling yourselves.

    A thousand a night, indexed to inflation. First year in advance, and then payment every morning after that, with the condition that if you miss one night, it's all over.

    I think the ongoing payment adds a bit of spice to it. Do you set a goal of X dollars and stop then? Will you be ordered by the court to continue wearing it for alimony for your gold digging ex wife that you met in the first year? Will the temptation of easy money for minor suffering slowly drive you insane? Time will tell.

  • People overestimate the percentage of immigrants in their country
  • People don't give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.

    Nobody is saying "hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent".

    Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I'd say they're pretty much on the money.

    Anyway, Poland, wtf.

  • BYD’s hybrid EV ute that could rival Australia’s bestselling vehicles goes on sale
  • The depth of the water was about the height of the wheels. Which I'm guessing is past 400mm.

    Hm. Better check your diff/transfer case oils just in case before things get expensive. Outlanders don't have high mounted diff breathers so you might have got some water in there.

  • What are some downsides to immortality that most don't think of?
  • "I have no mouth and I must scream" could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.

  • Fires set in drop boxes destroy hundreds of ballots in Washington and damage 3 in Oregon
  • In other words, if you cannot afford a stamp it would restrict you.

    The US postal system doesn't have reply-paid postage?

  • Now i have to pay to avoid being tracked?
  • Not really, it's just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they're putting in a middle ground between full "premium" subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

    Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I'd doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn't do what they claim.

    Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.

  • Removed
    Ventoy Update
  • "ChatGPT, write a letter to the community that says I am looking after this issue with untrusted BLOBs and it is of high importance but do not be specific about anything."

  • Hiker provided with assistance, and shoes, after attempting to climb Tasmanian mountain without them
  • For reference, temps at cradle mountain are still a few degrees below zero overnight.

    Soooo, you know, it's nice to feel connected to nature by going barefoot, but shoes are probably a good idea.

  • New 'doped' solid-state batteries can charge to 80 per cent in just nine minutes
  • Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

    A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they're all in use, and that's not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

    It's about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

    Not to say it's impossible, but infrastructure doesn't come cheap, and so it'll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car's battery.

  • Assuming I wire up the clip correctly could I use this to Libreboot a ThinkPad?
  • You are flashing the chip directly so apart from inadvertent short circuits and such if it doesn't work you can just keep trying until it does.

    As for wire length it all depends on how fast they clock the SPI bus when flashing. You'll probably be able to get away with 20cm or so without difficulty , I've driven SPI displays with that kind of wire length before.

  • Fisker bankruptcy hits major speed bump as fleet sale is now in question | TechCrunch
  • Well this seems to go against all sorts of disaster recovery practices, so I'm torn between believing they are truly incompetent or they are just lying.

  • Farewell B1061, you did admirably.
  • 43040 km/h

    Thats-a spicy meatball! 🤌

  • [REQ]: Hide posts below a certain vote score.

    I know, upvotes/downvotes mean less compared to That Other Place. But it would be nice if I could set Boost to not show all the spammy spam spam in my communities that have a score below a configurable threshold.

    1
    [Feature Request] option to merge or roll up simultaneous cross-posts in the feed.

    I subscribe to a bunch of communities and often there is a cross post with the same title and the same URL link across four or five of them at once. This usually results in a screen or two of the same post repeating for me, and I usually just find the one with the most commentary to check out.

    It would be nice just to do that automatically, and shrink to a single line or otherwise "fold in" the other cross posts to the highest commentary post so they don't clog my feed. Maybe a few "related" lines under the body of the post when you go into it, similar to the indication that it's been cross posted.

    Thoughts?

    0
    My customisable solar hot water system controller (project in progress)

    Hi all,

    In an effort to liven up this community, I'll post this project I'm working on.

    I'm building a solar hot water controller for my house. The collector is on the roof of a three-storey building, it is linked to a storage tank on the ground floor. A circulating pump passes water from the tank to the collectors and back again when a temperature sensor on the outlet of the collector registers a warm enough temperature.

    The current controller does not understand that there is 15 metres of copper piping to pump water through and cycles the circulating pump in short bursts, resulting in the hot water at the collector cooling considerably by the time it reaches the tank (even though the pipes are insulated). The goal of my project is to read the sensor and drive the pump in a way to minimise these heat losses. Basically instead of trying to maintain a consistent collector output temp with slow constant pulsed operation of the pump, I'll first try pumping the entire volume of moderately hot water from the top half of the collector in one go back to the tank and then waiting until the temperature rises again.

    I am using an Adafruit PyPortal Titano as the controller, running circuitpython. For I/O I am using a generic ebay PCF8591 board, which provides 4 analog input and a single analog output over an I2C bus. This is inserted into a motherboard that provides pullup resistors for the analog inputs and an optocoupled zero crossing SCR driver + SCR to drive the (thankfully low power) circulating pump. Board design is my own, design is rather critical as mains supply in my country is 240V.

    The original sensors are simple NTC thermistors, one at the bottom of the tank, and one at the top of the collector. I have also added 4 other Dallas 1-wire sensors to measure temperatures at the top of tank, ambient, tank inlet and collector pump inlet which is 1/3rd of the way up the tank. I have a duplicate of the onewire sensors already on the hot water tank using a different adafruit board and circuitpython. Their readings are currently uploaded to my own IOT server and I can plot the current system's performance, and I intend to do the same thing with this board.

    The current performance is fairly dismal, a very small bump of perhaps 0.5 - 1 deg C in the normally 55 degree C tank temperature around 12pm to 1pm, and this is in Australia in hot spring weather of 28-32 degrees C.(There's some inaccuracy of the tank temperatures, the sensors aren't really bonded to the tank in any meaningful way, so tank temp is probably a little warmer than this. But I'm looking for relative temperature increases anyway)

    Right now , the hardware is all together and functional, and is driving a 13W LED downlight as a test, and I can read the onewire temp sensors, read an analog voltage on the PCF8591 board (which will go to the NTC sensors), and I'm pulsing the pump output proportionally from 0-100 percent drive on a 30 second duty cycle, so that a pump drive function can simply say "run the pump at 70 percent" and you'll get 21 seconds on, 9 seconds off. Duty cycle time is adjustable, so I might lower it a bit to 15 or 10 seconds.

    The next step is to try it on the circulating pump (which is quite an inductive load, even if it is only 20 watts), and start working on an algorithm that reads the sensors and maximises water temperature back to the tank. There are a few safety features that I'll put in there, such as a "fault mode" to drive the pump at a fixed rate if there is a sensor failure, and a "night cool" mode if the hot water tank is severely over temperature to circulate hot water to the collector at night to cool it. There are the usual overtemp/overpressure relief valves in the system already.

    All this is going in a case with a clear hinged cover on the front so I can open it and poke the Titano's touchscreen to do some things.

    Right now I am away from home from work, so my replies might be a bit sporadic, but I'll try to get back to any questions soon-ish.

    A few photos for your viewing pleasure:

    The I/O and mainboard plus a 5V power supply mounted up: !

    The front of the panel, showing the Pyportal: !

    Thingsboard display showing readings from the current system: !

    Mainboard PCB design and construction via EasyEDA: !

    !

    7
    dgriffith Dave. @aussie.zone

    I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

    Posts 3
    Comments 399