What's that touchscreen in my room? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#371

Post by jimmaswell » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 6:57 PM UTC

miellaby wrote: post #136

I 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 A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else.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…

> 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.

At the average cost of electric in the USA this amounts to under $2/month. Seems negligible to me?

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=16+watts+*+24+hours+*+3...

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#372

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:02 PM UTC

The bit about how this device gets it's "Always accurate time" is the best part:

The device itself does not seem to be connected to the internet at all.

Actually, the time on the device itself is entirely incorrect, somewhere in 2015. But when I open the web UI, it now shows the correct time, even without an initial 15 minute delay.

Turns out, they found out an even more innovative time sync mechanism. When you open the UI in the browser, they quickly redirect you to "/set-time/" + Date.now(). This sets a global variable in the Node.js app responsible for "now".

https://mastodon.social/@laplab/111789584104871367

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#373

Post by yieldcrv » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

ChatGPT4V is pretty good at this by the way

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#374

Post by justusthane » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:24 PM UTC

M6WIQ wrote: post #176

The name of the company (Netthings) seemed familiar with me, turns out I had read an blog article regarding the hardcoded NTP servers that they used in their devices being firewalled off and therefore losing time sync. Article: https://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of... It also appears that they went into liquidation in 2018, so good luck getting any support with that device from them!

That makes the “ DATE & TIME ARE ALWAYS CORRECT AND NEVER NEED TO BE ADJUSTED” from the manual even better!

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#375

Post by israrkhan » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #371

miellaby wrote: post #136

I 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…

> 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. At the average cost of electric in the USA this amounts to under $2/month. Seems negligible to me? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=16+watts…

$2 is median daily wage for several countries. Negligible in US but not everywhere

source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#376

Post by petepete » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:41 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #236

petepete wrote: post #167

On a related note, I had a new boiler installed last year with Vaillant's smart controls. There's a little puck shaped 'control unit' with WiFi/radio which allows the app to talk to it, and it to talk to the thermostat. Like most people in the UK, the boiler's in the garage. A brick rectangle separate from the house. Did Vaillant include an ethernet port? You bet they didn't. The support team suggested I installed Wi…

I probably would have just installed an an extender plug that extends Wifi by signalling through the mains. Cheap and works quite well

I totally could have run a cable through the wall and installed an extra access point - I was planning on running the cable anyway to connect the control unit via ethernet, until I found that it didn't have one (yeah, I should have checked, I assumed it would).

I didn't really like the idea of having an access point in the garage just to service my boiler. Seems very wasteful.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#377

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:43 PM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #356

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible: UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take,…

A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you shou…

> A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI

On the contrary -- I was saying it was not equivalent, because it also works towards the goal of reducing CO2 consumption, whereas I can't imagine how a UBI would do so.

> if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production

The carbon credits I am imagining would not be "produced" per se -- they would, in total, represent the total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit, to reduce climate disaster, allocated equally to each individual, who all collectively "own" that natural limit. Those individuals can then sell their "contribution ration" to companies which wish to emit more than the CO2 allocated individually to their CEO, or whatever. So ideally credits will be available for purchase by the CEO, at whatever rate the CEO's fellow people are willing to charge the CEO. Mitigations will need to be done by humanity regardless, or else.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#378

Post by ayewo » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:47 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #342

xerox13ster wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that. he bought it on Amazon. He has every reason to be worried that it won't burn out. Louis Rossman did a video[0] where he put 8 amps through a 2 amp fuse and left the room for quite a long time, I think it was several minutes with 8a going through a 2a fuse. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

Amazon had one of their buildings in California shut down a few months ago by the fire department when a generator started smoking. It was probably due to a bad fuse they bought off Amazon. https://signalscv.com/2023/07/fire-breaks-out-at-amazon/ That's how blinded by their avarice Amazon has become; they can't even protect their own house. Notice how the Nilight fuses ( https://amzn.to/3S06G2n ) are still listed, ev…

> I know Amazon monitors Hacker News PR closely, since they took down those ChatGPT generated listings within minutes of us posting them here.

Like other engineers at Big Tech, Amazon Engineers also read HN and the post in question happened to be on the HN front page around the lunch break of a work day, IIRC.

It’s easy to imagine one or more Amazon engineers internally pinging the team responsible for Amazon listings hence the appearance that Amazon was able to take down/hide those ChatGPT generated listings in less than an hour of it landing here.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#379

Post by philwelch » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #347

philwelch wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for their heating requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically US uses a split phase system so you can combine two 120V circuits to get 240V. This is how most heavy appliances are wired.

Right but that means you need a special setup either way. In europe you just have a normal electric plug, nothing special.

North America has standard plugs for 240V too. They’re different from the 120V plug for the obvious reason, but it’s not a particularly special setup.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#380

Post by kilroy123 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:25 PM UTC

joemaller1 wrote: post #305

“hello_stranger.txt” feels like something I would’ve written as a 11 year old pretending to be a mad scientist. I’m going to start leaving those files on every system I touch. Thank you Nikita.

I do something like that but it's actually a Canary token. So I can know if someone is snooping.