I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Sounds like it was a 2 petawatt pulsed laser, with picosecond pulses, so 2kJ/pulse. Staggering amount of power and energy for a pulsed laser!

Note that it’s not CW, so the average power will be much, much, much less than the pulsed power. Too lazy to find the rep rate to see average power.

I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.

Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!

Remind me again, what color was Obama’s scandalous suit?

I’m not mad at the huge amount I pay in taxes. I’m mad about what I get in return.

WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.

I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.

If he introduced the hobbits to breakfast burritos and breakfast tacos, I’m pretty sure all would be forgiven.

While neat, this is not self-sustaining — it’s taking more energy to power it than you’re getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you’re so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)

One viewpoint is that we’ll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won’t work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that’s something.

If you exclude blocked instances, you’re a lot higher than #5…

play(1)? I’m getting cat $FILE > /dev/snd vibes…

I’m curious how the battery percentage went up

Physicists hate this one weird trick…

Is that true though? As in, is it really that dangerous? It seems that you’ll dissipate power equal to the inefficiency times the nominal charging power, so something like 5V x 2A x inefficiency (inefficiency being 1-efficiency), which will probably be of order a watt.

I can use my car battery to charge itself without any issues — I just plug the red terminal to itself, and same with the black, which is to say, a battery is always connected in a way that “charges itself.”

I think the key is that the battery probably isn’t really playing a big role in OOP’s setup — electricity doesn’t “go through the battery,” it just goes from the charging input to the power output circuits, with the additional power (due to inefficiency) being provided by the battery.

I’m not sure though — the power output and the charging input are both regulated and (almost certainly) current limited. So I think (not positive…) that you’re basically dissipating your power in the inefficiency the charging and output circuits, with this power coming from the battery.

The inefficiency should (I think…) just be the round-trip inefficiency of the charging/discharging of your power bank — this should be way, way less than the short-circuit power dissipation.

The simplest toy model is to take a battery and try to charge itself. So you put jumpers on the + terminal and you connect those to the + terminal, and same for - (charging is + to +, NOT + to -). But this is silly because you’ve just attached a loop of wire to your terminals, which is equivalent to doing nothing. With charging circuits in between things get much more complicated, but I’m not sure if it goes full catastrophic short…

Our home averaged 7.5kWh/day in December (we did not travel and we’re home with family the entire time); this is about 10x less daily energy than the battery capacity of a modern EV.

Now, we have gas heating and stove/oven, so that adds a huge amount of load — but my numbers above are for 24hr energy, and batteries wouldn’t need to supply that whole time.

Of course, this doesn’t address cost, and it doesn’t address natural resources, like you mentioned. But that actual required amount of energy per capita can certainly be achieved with current battery technology.

The exorbitant PG&E charges are usually “delivery charges,” not the “generation charge” iirc. So we’re paying reasonable rates for cheap, clean energy, but we’re getting charged out the ass for getting the electricity to our home.

It sucks either way, but charging for delivery sucks more because on top of it all if we run solar and sell back to the grid we only get the generation charge (which is minimal). At least, that’s my understanding — we don’t currently have a home solar installation.

If you don’t want to sail the high seas, and you don’t want to pay, the library is a great, free option.

I think there are examples of projects getting criticized for not recreating the corposhit. Take GIMP — sure some folks really like it, but there are huge swaths of people who basically just say, “why doesn’t it work like Photoshop?!” and get very frustrated with its different approach.

Personally, I like Google Photos — the interface, not the product — so when Immich came along and basically cloned it, I was really happy (I think Immich is fantastic, and at this point calling it a Photos clone is kinda offensive tbh — it’s way cool).

Some corposhit just sucks, yeah, but some is actually well thought out — no shame in taking the concept and running with it, IMHO.

And environment — DISPLAY and PATH in particular.

For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).

In English, it’s usually used in a context where there’s some humor, frustration, or irony involved, like in the comic.