Limonene
@Limonene@lemmy.world
- Comment on Building DIY a smart doorbell but would appreciate some help with the power and wiring 2 weeks ago:
Actually, I think that’s a really good idea. Just be aware of possible inductance in the long wires from the transformer area going to the camera. Putting a large electrolytic capacitor next to the camera should fix that.
As for your bell, there are dead simple systems that use a battery-powered stick-on button with a transmitter, and a chime/receiver that plugs into a wall. If you want to be fancy, you could find a way to power the transmitter with that 5VDC, in parallel with the camera… or you could just keep it simple and use the battery that comes with the button. They last near forever.
- Comment on Building DIY a smart doorbell but would appreciate some help with the power and wiring 2 weeks ago:
Remember that voltage is measured across a pair of wires, so you can’t power the chime with only a single wire. That’s part of what makes this difficult – these doorbell systems only have the bare minimum of wiring in them. Powering the camera and the chime in series with each other is quite difficult. I think a lot of these things just accept the short circuit, and use a battery to power the camera while the button is being held.
Here is what I was proposing, and I think what ch00f was also proposing. Replace “5VDC power supply” in this diagram with “a full bridge rectifier and a bunch of caps” in their description, and also note that your camera probably requires a well regulated 5VDC supply.
- Comment on Building DIY a smart doorbell but would appreciate some help with the power and wiring 2 weeks ago:
The easy way: take your existing wiring. Put an 18VAC to 5VDC power supply in parallel with the pushbutton. Then, the output of that power supply goes to the 5V USB input of your camera setup.
The downside is that it will reboot the camera every time someone rings the doorbell, because you are shorting across the camera’s power supply.
You can put a resistor in series with the button to fix this. You will need to find a resistance that’s low enough to still cause the chime to ring, but high enough not to disrupt the camera’s power supply. Maybe start around 20 ohms. If you can’t find a working resistor value, you can change the transformer to a 24V or 36V transformer, but make sure to keep that resistor high enough not to burn out the chime, and make sure your 5VDC power supply can handle the increase in input voltage.
- Comment on The best censorship is creators' self-censorship. 3 weeks ago:
This post was kind of a pain to read, with all the reddit links. I had to convert them to old.reddit.com to get them to display properly.
I think Steam was in the right to remove that one game. “Looks = age” is true for cartoon characters, since they have no biological age. It seems the character was described as 19 in lore, but in Steam’s opinion, they looked like a prepubescent child. Since cartoon child pornography is illegal, they were right to remove it.
But that other stuff seems to be legal. Cartoon rape porn games are appalling to me, but are probably legal, and should be legal. I agree that people being unable to pay for legal (even if appalling) content is a form of undesirable censorship.
It’s probably Visa’s fault. They seem like a complete monopoly. I rarely see anyone with a non-Visa credit card. I myself have a Discover card, but I have to have a Visa card too because some merchants don’t accept Discover. Every merchant accepts Visa, and every customer has to have a Visa card. Merchants today are more likely to refuse cash than to refuse Visa.
Possible solutions:
-
The libertarian approach: The government needs to remove barriers to entry in making new payment systems. Loosen BSA requirements for smaller payment systems. Require existing banks to interoperate with the design of new payment systems, if their customer requests it.
-
The socialist approach: The US government could create a payment system. It would be protected by constitutional free speech rules, so legal content couldn’t be blocked.
-
The moderate approach: Treat Visa like the monopoly that it is. Treat it as a defacto commons, where people are forced to go even if they don’t want to be there. As long as it remains a monopoly, it should be required to carry all legal customers. Even customers selling appalling content, like cartoon rape porn games.
-
- Comment on "Democrats' Normalization Of Property Theft Led To Squatter Crisis" 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think thefederalist.com is a reliable news site.
- Comment on Microsoft waited 6 months to patch actively exploited admin-to-kernel vulnerability 2 months ago:
Microsoft has enforced mandatory digital signatures for drivers, and getting a digital signing key from Microsoft costs a ton of money. So, presumably they do care.
In contrast, consider nProtect GameGuard, the anti-cheat system in Helldivers 2. It is a rootkit, and runs in the kernel. Why does Microsoft permit this? Shouldn’t this be blocked? It must be using either an exploit like the article, or a properly signed driver. Either way, Microsoft could fix it – by patching the exploit, or revoking the signing key.
The fact that Microsoft hasn’t done anything about malicious anticheat rootkits is a sign that they really don’t care. They just want their payment.
- Comment on Amazon — like SpaceX — is the latest company to claim the U.S. labor board is unconstitutional, after receiving numerous labor complaints from employees 2 months ago:
How would me joining a union help with the Amazon problem? My pay and benefits (and my coworkers’ pay and benefits, to the extent of my knowledge) are very good, so we don’t currently need a union. My job is completely unrelated to Amazon, and my employer isn’t a customer of Amazon or its competitors.
I’m not going to stop complaining about Amazon.
- Comment on Rakuten launches cloud storage with unlimited file transfers, targets businesses and individuals, with free 10GB storage 2 months ago:
Nobody’s saying to host it on-premises. The SaaSS article is advocating running software that you control on servers that you control. That’s it. The server is likely in a datacenter, and its hardware could be owned by the datacenter, the customer, or someone else. It could be a virtualized host.
The SaaSS article is about software and services, not hardware.
- Comment on Audacity adds AI audio editing capabilities thanks to free Intel OpenVINO plugins 2 months ago:
According to the repo, it builds fine on Linux. They just don’t distribute a binary for it.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I literally own a CD of Windows NT 4. I have used it before on two different laptops, a long long time ago. Windows NT 4 absolutely did exist.
- Comment on Towards a new age 3 months ago:
It’s Apple, which is a dealbreaker for me. Everything Apple is proprietary. All the OS, all the apps, everything is locked down. Last I used it, you can’t even compile your own software for Apple platforms without paying a massive fee.
I will wait to buy the open source AR goggles, even if it makes me 10 years late to the bandwagon.
- Comment on xkcd #2867: DateTime 5 months ago:
C++ user with operator overloading: “T2 minus T1.”
Let someone else implement the class. There’s probably a library for it.
- Comment on BMW 9 months ago:
Back when I worked at IBM, there were a bunch of flags hanging in the cafeteria that represented every country where IBM did business. We often wondered, why wasn’t there a Nazi Germany flag? After all, IBM did sell a ton of machines to the Nazis to keep track of Jews and other undesirables, in order to commit genocide. I wonder why IBM wouldn’t want people to know about that? /s