this is first time i have read something completely in a long span of time !!
I agree, I really enjoyed the author’s curiosity and writing style!
What's that touchscreen in my room?
131–140 of 576 posts
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#132> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity... Responding with disbelief seems a little over the top. It isn't typically easy to run wires in pre-built spaces. Sounds like a resilient design to me.
Not resiliant, because in the 10-20 year lifespan of a home electrical panel, at least one critical vulnerability is going to allow complete remote pwnage of that device. It's stupid IOT garbage that belongs in ewaste, especially with a trivial remote code execution mechanism.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#133I like the part where you flip the neighbor’s power off for a couple seconds. That’ll teach ‘em to get a UPS!
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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#134Interesting article but one thing stood out: The landlord had no idea what this is. There are no buttons or labels on the thing, just a tiny yellow light to let you know it has the power. You move in and find a mysterious device on the wall that, at least to me, appears somewhat ominous and it's not obvious whether it may have a camera and possibly a microphone (the picture of it on the manual appears to show that it…
The landlord had no idea what this is.
Golgafrincham B Ark candidate detected.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a time, Java was set to be the 'everything everywhere' language, IIRC in some quarters the hype behind Java on everything was even bigger than Cloud, then Crypto, then AI.
I remember those days well. I had the misfortune of working for one of Java's biggest advocates at Sun, Patrick Naughton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Naughton To this day, I refuse to use Java or anything on the Java ecosystem, like Clojure, or Groovy, etc.
I've always thought of Java programming as being kind of perverse with the patterns and verbosity, now I see where the perversion is coming from.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#136I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm.
All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a bar graph could be done with a pair of microcontrollers communicating onto some wired bus.
With the power supplies of this era, this pair of devices probably pumps 16w idle. Running 24/24 7/7, they probably consume as much as a small fridge as a whole. The LCA of the solution must be consterning as well, especially compared with few one dollard microcontrollers.
The worst of all is that this whole mess turned into bricks probably 3 years after it was installed, maybe less.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s say you desperately need a cup of tea. So you buy a cheap 4-way extension cable and 4 electric kettles. You fill all the kettles and turn them on at the same time for maximum tea-making throughput. The combined load of all the kettles exceeds the rating of the extension cable. With a fuse: the fuse in the extension cable plug blows, you buy another fuse, and learn some patience. Without a fuse: the extension ca…
Without a fuse, the circuit breaker trips and then you go reset it and hopefully learn not to plug in so many kettles next time. You would have to be a maniac to wire up a house without fuses or breakers.
From sibling comment:
> British household electrical systems are normally built as one large ring circuit, originally in order to save copper after WW2.
> This means you don't have breakers for each branch circuit (there are no branch circuits), just the single mains breaker for the house.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#138I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm. All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a ba…
The reason why the Mirai botnet is still at large is: Android.
From a business perspective nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming. Frontend devs are dirt cheap, especially for something as simple as that interface displaying the bar charts.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#139> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity... Responding with disbelief seems a little over the top. It isn't typically easy to run wires in pre-built spaces. Sounds like a resilient design to me.
Not resiliant, because in the 10-20 year lifespan of a home electrical panel, at least one critical vulnerability is going to allow complete remote pwnage of that device. It's stupid IOT garbage that belongs in ewaste, especially with a trivial remote code execution mechanism.
Layperson will always prefer wireless. "But what if I need to move the tablet?"
Never bet against convenience.
Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?
#140> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon OP might want to watch Louis Rossmann's video about buying things from Amazon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU
That's what immediately stood out to me, why the hell would you order it from Amazon instead of literally driving 5 minutes down the road to pick one up from any electronics or hardware store? what a horribly inefficient way to do things