I think it's like slices of tree trucks to build wall clocks (or whatever) kind of wall art out of: If you know a guy who knows a guy who works with trees, then it's easy to get a rough cut-off slice.
It may even be free. If they're already there cutting the thing with an appropriate saw, then slicing off one more bit and saving it for Bill's friend jgrahamc isn't a big deal.
A previous customer paid money for a new fan, and then they got a refund by returning the old fan as new.
Now they have a new fan, and they have their money back. The shitbird customer is pleased with their infinite-fan life hack.
Their return goes back normal stock.
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It's ugly and reprehensible. It happens all the time. It happens with places that are down the street, too.
Like: Auto parts. When you stop in at Autozone to get a new water pump for your Ford, the person there retrieves it, brings it to the counter, opens the box, and looks at it.
The primary thing they're looking at is the condition. They want to make sure it looks new before they hand it over to you.
Because distributors sometimes send out used parts as new. Because customers are scumbags sometimes, and people are lazy sometimes, and shit gets put into the wrong piles sometimes, and -- like any other aspect in life -- it's imperfect.
The switcharoo could have happened anywhere. Maybe even in another store with a different marquee in another state. It might not have even been deliberate.
If the median voter "declines" because they're become skilled at and accustomed to using a bot to help them make complex decisions, then maybe they'll skip lazily voting D or R down the line and we'll be alright anyway.
As the backhoe became common in any given region, the people there lost the ability to expertly dig big holes by hand. Many of them had to find different ways to earn money as their previous positions as diggers evaporated at the behest of this newfangled machine.
I see that as a societal advancement, and in no way do I see it as a problem that needs solving.
When we run out of backhoes, then we can learn to dig expertly once again. We're flexible that way.
Very bad analogy, and it looks like perhaps you don't understand this technology at all. Studies are showing that overusing it makes people stupid. Young people today are going to wind up completely unemployable.
That can be an issue with a device that is always plugged in. Or with a device that is always unplugged, resting in a drawer somewhere. Or with a device that gets used with normal charge and discharge cycles. Or with things that are carefully-managed. tl;dr, it can be an issue.
I'm still waiting for the 9.7" iPad Pro that I have to swell up. I got it used, but AFAICT the battery is 10 years old at this point. It has definitely been plugged in ~24/7 since I got it.
Sometimes, I notice that has decided it's time to discharge itself somewhat and then recharge again. I assume this is for BMS calibration or battery health or both; I just let it do its thing and it's been fine.
Meanwhile: A disused Samsung Galaxy S7's battery swelled up enough to split the case open while I had it sitting on a shelf, switched off. It was about 6 years old at that point, and I was careful to leave it at about a 60% SoC when I put it on that shelf.
I haven't had the battery well up in phone that sees daily use -- yet. I won't be surprised if/when it happens.
I still have them. I use them for kitchen timers, alarm clocks, a quick weather forecast, random maths and unit conversions, and whatever I want to activate with Home Assistant. There's one on the night stand with a clock on the front that I never need to set, that adjusts its brightness automatically based on ambient light, and which gets used as a Bluetooth speaker for the tablet that I watch dumb shit on YouTube with sometimes.
So, like: The light switch in the garage is very inconveniently-located, and it's dark AF in there both at night and when I walk in from a bright sunny day. The lights can be activated by voice and that's pretty nice to have.
They're also good when I want background music that's actually-in-the-background: I've got some very nice audio systems for when I want focus on listening to music, but they are much more successful at being involving than at being being ignored. The kinda-meh-sounding Alexa-type widget on the table over there does a better job for background noise.
I'm not anywhere near 60 yet. I just find that stuff like this is useful.
(Yeah, yeah. I could build or buy voice-controlled speaker-widgets that integrate with Home Assistant in an open-source way, and even use them with a local LLM if I wanted to. I'm disinterested in that kind of effort at this time.)
Getting wakeword stuff to work 1. reliably and 2. very low latency has been what has held back local fixed point hardware assistants. I've taken a couple stabs at this myself but custom wakeword is a weirdly hard nut to crack for the open source community.
How so? A Matter controller just needs to be powered on and exist somewhere on the [wireless] LAN to do its job.
An old iPad on a stand on the table in the breakfast nook is conceptually fine as a Matter controller until someone picks it up and leaves with it, or unplugs it and lets it run out of battery.
Apple forbids this kind of use because it defiles the majesty of their garden and its walls (or something), but that's just Apple doing Apple things.
Expectation of usage. An iPad designer assumes it will be taken all around, leave the house, put in a book bag, etc.
While an old iPad being used as an entertainment management surface won’t, that’s not the prime use case intended for iPad.
Apple decided to focus on products whose primary purpose is a stationary device, like a speaker or a TV-attached device. Sure, you can move them place to place, but most won’t.
The problem with repurposing these devices as perma-plugged-in hubs is they have a battery that could eventually swell from staying plugged in 24/7. You have reports here and there from people whose tablet-on-a-wall (not necessarily iPad) swelled up and bulged against the wall.
Even if the iPad recognizes it's always plugged in and discharges from 100 to 80 occasionally, it's still a use case that increases the chance of battery swelling.
I don't mean this as "Apple knows best, psh, silly customer" but a bit of "that's one reason this exists" and a bit of being annoyed that you can't run tablets battery-less off AC to prevent it.
Yeah, it's kinda sad or at least annoying to me when Apple creates the problem and then "solves" it for me by taking away functionality. They essentially invented the no-user-serviceable-battery concept, or at least proved its tolerability by the masses.
It would pretty obviously be easy to add a wizard that prepares the iPad to be repurposed as a stationary home hub, setting the battery to be held at 50% and neither charged nor discharged, sending a notification to your phone if it's unplugged, choosing a slideshow to double as a digital frame, etc. But to be fair to Apple, no other companies would build such a thing either, it's just the consumption oriented system we live in.
> No, I think it's that we've been repeatedly told of the dangers of plugging a generator into a socket of the house and the problems that will occur if the power comes back on if it's still running.
Yes, but that's dangerous for reasons[1] that people often don't bother explaining -- and that aren't important for solar grid-tied inverters[2].
[1]: The seemingly-ideal way to plug a big fat generator into an American house in a hurry is to use a double-ended suicide cord to feed into the 240v dryer outlet. That provides plenty of power to get a lot of things done, it's a single-outlet circuit, and it lights up both sides of the split phase panel. But that's bad.
The most obvious way that it's bad is because we shouldn't have energized male prongs. Like, ever -- that's just extra shit to get hurt with. But this suicide cord idea relies upon their use.
The other way that it's bad is that the generator doesn't know whether the house is still connected to the grid or not. So unless we deliberately disconnect from the grid, there's a wonderful chance that we feed it even though that grid is presently non-functional. This can fuck people up: The transformer on the pole outside (or in the box down the way, or whatever) will cheerfully convert the sleepy 240v from the generator into thousands of volts on the wires outside that were completely dead until someone decided to get clever. Now, the guy cleaning up storm debris down the block or the lineman doing the repair gets the fuck shocked out of them in spooky-dead kinds of ways. (Yeah, yeah: We shouldn't ever do anything near downed lines of any kind, and the lineman should always have appropriate PPE. And we shouldn't plug our generators into our dryer socket, too. Death is permanent.)
Panels with interlocks and wall-mounted male sockets that accept generator input both exist, and the combination of them mitigates both issues. The combination also prevents a third problem: Power coming back on while the generator is running.
[2]: But a proper UL-listed plug-in solar inverter doesn't have any of these problems. The issues are sidestepped because it outputs nothing when the grid is down, as a baked-in function. So there's no energized male plug to be a hazard, and there's also no interlock required to ensure that the grid isn't backfed while it is down. You can hypothetically unplug the solar inverter from the wall on a bright sunny day and lick the prongs, and nothing happens.
It may even be free. If they're already there cutting the thing with an appropriate saw, then slicing off one more bit and saving it for Bill's friend jgrahamc isn't a big deal.
But without that kind of relationship, it's hard.
(I want one, too.)
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