221–230 of 248 posts
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> This problem seems prevalent on cheaper devices. I’ve seen it on plenty of higher-end devices as well; and even worse. The worst offender I’ve encountered is the TermoWorks Billows. ThermoWorks is a well established brand that makes high end thermometers and is considered one of the best on the market. So I was quite surprised to discover how their ‘Billows’ product is powered. The device itself needs 12v and has a…
So it's based on Qualcomm Quick Charge? QC is a competing, slightly older, slightly simpler standard to USB-PD that can do what you described. It's...useful sometimes.
You can find it here: https://www.thermoworks.com/12volt-ac-adapter/
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It can, it just needs the two resistors, which is the cheapest possible thing the standards committee could have asked manufacturers to do. USB-C gets complicated at the high end, but for basic functionality I think the standards committee did a very good job at making the cheapest way to do it the correct way, e.g. a USB-C to 3.5mm audio adaptor can be entirely passive, it just needs the right resistor in it.
Then a lot of phones don't support it, so it took me three attempts to find a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter that didn't have it's own DAC that would work with my phone's FM radio lol
> cost of a couple of pints
in 2025, I guess it can be a maximum of 2.5 pints. Because in Luxembourg, the price of a pint became 6-8 euros...
> The watch is simply missing the two 5.1k resistors connecting the CC1 and CC2 pins of the USB-C connector to ground that are required to indicate to whatever is plugged in that it wants 5v power. This is so annoying. Back when USB-C was less prevalent, I bought a pair of wireless earbuds over another for the same reason as the title - because it used USB-C. But then I cannot charge it with my macbook, unless I add…
This is insanely common. I have about 6 devices with this problem, and I consider it unforgivable. Not only did you not include USBC charging, you went out of your way to trick me and lie and pretend you did. I would have preferred just using micro usb at that point. Powkiddy committed fraud and said the RGB30 can charge from USB-C, but they lied, it can only charge from USB A to C cables. Using it is a massive pain…
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It's not the usb c committee problem, the devices you are buying are out of spec This is because the cable is 2 sided so it can't assume polarity So it's a tradeoff for not having to guess how to insert the cable
>This is because the cable is 2 sided so it can't assume polarity Not really. The USB-C connection pinout is symmetric about a 180 degree rotation, at least as far as power connections go. It's entirely possible (and common, e.g. when using passive converters) to just put power out of it constantly. The main reason for the signaling resistors is to avoid having power presented on the pins when it's not connected, whi…
If you have an A end and a B or C end, you can assume that the device on the A end is supplying power and the device on the B or C end is consuming power without breaking anything. The A end cannot supply power to it's device by design, so an A to C cable cannot be used to power the A device from the C device, regardless of whether the device on the C end can supply power.
But if you have two C ends, you need some way to establish which device is the supply device and which is the consuming device, because the cable can be used to connect two devices which both can supply power (e.g. a laptop and a phone).
Does it require the manufacturer's servers to be available to function? I find it strange that in this whole, cool, nerdy review there's no mention of whether the device is fully yours and works on your phone, or if the app is (like in most smartwatches) just a glorified browser tab for your health data stored plaintext on a free service
As I say in the post: > You can always uninstall the app once done setting it up. So no need to rely on 3rd party servers. I also mention that you can use GadgetBridge if you want to store your own data locally.
That makes this a seriously good option, I was looking for this a while ago but didn't find anything besides Pinetime, so I ordered a Pinetime and found out the heartbeat sensor is about as accurate on my wrist as tarot cards (I know it works for a few people, but most seemed to have the same issue). Everything else I could find back then was cloud-based or didn't do health tracking (or, n=1, didn't support Android)
> "I plugged it until fully charged, then wore it conti> nuously. After 24 hours of use, even with all my fiddling, that battery was at 80%. After four days, it still had 40% left"* So if a £16 generic competitor can last 4 days, what's Apple doing wrong? Why can't a £450 Apple Watch (non-Ultra) last a full 24 hours on a charge?
WTF Apple watches cost $450? You can't even run a text editor on it! What are people buying?
For example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tot-mini/id1644609331
Whether it's a good idea to use a tiny watch screen as your text editor, on the other hand...
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AliExpress prices don't include shipping, which are effectively baked into Amazon's pricing to cover SuperSaver & Prime customers.
A lot of stuff is practically free for shipping. For small items, 10+$. I bought a lot of 5-10$ things that costs more than 3 times on amazon. Aliexpress is much cheaper even if you include shipping if there's separate shipping fee. Amazon is convenient for speed + returns.
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WTF Apple watches cost $450? You can't even run a text editor on it! What are people buying?
You certainly can run text editors on Apple Watch. For example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tot-mini/id1644609331 Whether it's a good idea to use a tiny watch screen as your text editor, on the other hand...
I don't think there's an app that lets you just edit arbitrary files which can be read by other apps or transferred to/from the watch with something like ssh, just these weird canned things that depend on network services run by Apple and/or the particular developer.