Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret • Hacker News Board

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#351

Post by bityard » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

Gracana wrote: post #157

bityard wrote: post #7

My favorite mouse is the logitech anywhere mx original. It runs for months in two AA batteries. They don't make these anymore and the newer ones all have built in lipo death clocks. I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.

I quite liked those as well, but I had to switch to something else after three failed due to the same problem. The thin plastic protrusions that press the microswitch plungers wear out, causing awful switch bounce and eventually an inability to hold the button down at all.

I've seen this one a couple of them, it's a known weakness. Some were made with poor quality microswitches. Interestingly, the very first one I bought is still my daily driver.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#352

Post by bityard » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

smiley1437 wrote: post #79

bityard wrote: post #7

My favorite mouse is the logitech anywhere mx original. It runs for months in two AA batteries. They don't make these anymore and the newer ones all have built in lipo death clocks. I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.

I loved the original MX Anywhere too, but I found that iFixit offers a replacement Lipo for the MX Anywhere 3 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Logitech+MX+Anywhere+3+Battery+... It looks approximately as difficult as changing the battery on a smartphone. Knowing that the battery could be changed gave me the piece of mind to switch. The battery management on the MXA 3 is really good - lasts a very long time and is quick t…

I'll consider it, but I _really_ don't want to plug in a mouse to charge it, especially when I have to also use it. Wired mice drive me crazy (and did even before wireless was a thing). So I'd have to buy 2. And $80 a pop is hard to swallow, I bought all of mine for under $35 each.

And there's _still_ no USB-C unify receiver? Ugh.

There needs to be a DIY mouse-hacking community on par with the customized mechanical keyboard community.

Re: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret

#353

Post by glowingly » Sun, Aug 14, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

pca006132 wrote: post #297

glowingly wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be lucky if my Thinkpad X1C6 would get the same battery life in Linux as it did in Windows. It usually does well, if I don't open the web browser. As such, despite running 5.18, Wayland, Firefox, "latest nonfree version of ffmpeg with actual 264 codecs," etc etc etc, GPU accelerated decoding of videos is still too much to ask for in FF or MPV. VLC sometimes does it. Sometimes - usually after making sure I hav…

What codec did you try? I'm using Firefox on Linux as well, but hardware decoding seems fine, power consumption reported by powertop is not too high (1.5W?).

On tumbleweed, I've tried the VLC repo's ffmpeg for h264, packman, and now opi codecs. The first and third seem to work for VLC.

On Silverblue, I don't recall the exact steps, only that I gave up and just used "enhanced h264ify" to disable h264, in favor of vp9. This still breaks many other websites that use h264, but at least youtube mostly works. Mpv flatpak works, so I just use mpv to render the h264-only videos that youtube still has. Of course, this is one area where snaps has the edge of flatpak, IMO - nice default aliases in the terminal, instead of 'flatpak run io.Mpv.mpv https://youtu.be/watch.......' or having to create my own, or having to use another program to do it.