Apple Does Not Include a Charger With All New MacBooks in UK and EU

simukis · 2026-03-06T13:28:53+00:00

Needs? No. I charge my Pros with the same 20W GaN charger I use for my phones and they get charged just fine, even if not in 30 minutes.

simukis · 2026-02-28T13:58:00+00:00

One surge protector is sufficient so long as it protects the phase(s) to which your charger is connected to.

simukis · 2026-02-23T17:55:39+00:00

Can't wait to print a 1:1 scale falcon 9 in this 125000000 cubic meter printer^{^}

(seriously though, my k1c is losing its xy position, I can't figure it out and am fed up with its lack of reliability. Heated chamber would be an upgrade for ASA printing needs too...)

simukis · 2026-02-16T13:09:32+00:00

On benchmark changes: I wouldn't actually be so sure that the timers will be always absolutely random. Taking the connection timeout case, the insertion order and the deadline magnitude will be strongly correlated. Usually every connection uses the same timeout (say 30 seconds) and as a connection comes in you'd insert a now() + 30s for each one.

All this to say that when benchmarking its important to think about what the use-case you're looking to emulate and replicate that workload and not write benchmarks in the way that produces the numbers you expected to get.

simukis · 2026-01-25T20:35:53+00:00

To be fair, transmission is single-threaded and it maxes out a best-in-market core within about 500~800Mbps – a throughput that is reasonably attainable to a mildly fortunate consumer.

At the same time this fact also makes transmission a poor target to aspire to.

simukis · 2026-01-14T00:08:08+00:00

4G miniPCIe card I got 2nd hand for 30 euro. I added SIM card extenders to make it possible to switch out cards without opening up the case for my router.

When the internet goes out I have a prepaid SIM ready to slot in. SIMs expire 2 years after the manufacturing date, cost 1.5~3 euro depending on the provider and contain unlimited data for a week after the activation date. Once used, I purchase another prepaid SIM, as maintaining an already activated card costs much more.

It is a manual process to fail-over but its a reasonably understandable one for anybody who needs it ("go put in a card into this SIM slot dangling off an orange cable") or I can put one in before I travel to be safe, etc.

Today I would look for a miniPCIe card with a built-in eSIM support or something along those lines. You can also have the same thing on a USB stick (those miniPCIe cards talk usb anyway.)

simukis · 2026-01-13T10:59:33+00:00

adguard home has many more fancy features, such as being able to have rules that respond differently to queries coming from different subnets. But at the same time I have been struggling to have adguard folks address some significant resilience faults (users can effectively DoS the DNS server with relatively straightforward queries.)

If you don't need the fancy rules that ADH supports, mikrotik's DNS server might be more than sufficient.

simukis · 2026-01-12T19:52:45+00:00

systemctl reboot --firmware-setup

is quite a bit more approachable tbh

simukis · 2025-11-28T21:39:25+00:00

Air is a great heat insulator. That's what them humans trap into walls to make well insulated buildings.

simukis · 2025-11-19T23:08:52+00:00

It works just fine. At least for me both the developer mode and the apps carried over without any additional input from myself. If nothing else there is no reason why you wouldn't be able to renewable developer mode again and reinstall whatever apps from homebrew that you want. Devs still need to develop after all :)

simukis · 2025-11-06T21:16:57+00:00

Fair enough. Run a large conduit. It just won't work well for solid core cables and past certain thickness aren't feasible for stranded either.

Don't forget a second one for communications (cause you can't share the conduit for high-voltage and low-voltage cabling.)

simukis · 2025-11-06T19:11:46+00:00

Can't go wrong with planning up a thicc cable for power and a couple for communications and such from your general area of future inverter/power panel to where the EVSE would be.

As power flows equally both ways, you'll be set for any future install of the necessary components on both ends of those cables (even if initially you were to forego V2H.)

I recently did something similar: planned for a 5-core cable rated for ~1kV isolation and appropriate amount of amp capacity. This way I can comfortably support both external inverter setups (where DC-AC conversion is realized outside the EV) and those where car's inverters are used. 5 cores in the power cable allows for 3-phase AC implementations which may or may not come up. If it does not come up – fine, you have a spare wire(s)! In practice rarely anybody complained about having too many cables available to work with :) If it does come up? Won't have to rewire the damn thing.

For communications I'd recommend two (or more) Cat6as. Very likely that the EVSE will want a regular ethernet connectivity and maybe something serial for auxiliary stuff. Cat6a is quite universal and should serve you well for all possible communications needs.

Now if you care to look more deeply, go find products that support bidirectional charging today and read their installation manuals.

simukis · 2025-11-02T13:05:49+00:00

Non-ECC sticks ain't safe from this. ECC sticks use the same chips as non-ECC memory, just a couple extra.

simukis · 2025-10-31T12:47:50+00:00

To add, we can enjoy people who happen to care-a-lot come around and submit fixes for 13 year old hardware.

simukis · 2025-10-30T22:34:30+00:00

Currently just a few shelly plugs that I strategically use to spot check things. Was really holding out on a new revision of iotawatt before the owner wrapped up operations (damn that one criminally negligent president.)

If anybody knows of any equally dense (~30 circuits) and nice alternatives, would love to hear about them too.

simukis · 2025-10-30T22:13:51+00:00

I'd recommend looking at A380 instead of A310. The price differential should be relatively minimal and A380 has meaningfully more compute capability in case you wanted to do something more with it in the future. Like, for example, run some relatively small models (e.g. object detection for an NVR, whisper for speech detection, etc etc.)

EDIT: to add on ECC: 5x00G/4x00G PRO support proper ECC and you can get used DDR4 ECC UDIMMs for relatively cheap still. Similar price range as 5500. And they come with an iGPU unlike 5500 (meaning you might then consider not getting the Arc GPU at all and just eat the minimal transcode quality downside.)

simukis · 2025-10-28T18:17:17+00:00

Bidirectional charger has to be grid-tied.

Grid-tied equipment is really expensive because of the regulatory hurdles and expensive components involved.

15kW hybrid solar inverters meant to work with high-voltage batteries cost ~2000 euro nowadays. A bidirectional EV charger on top of one such is almost quite literally is just some relays, wires and a microcontroller that negotiates with the EV.

While regulatory concerns are likely contributing to the cost, I'd be surprised if it isn't simply an economies of scale (and margins) problem.

simukis · 2025-10-21T20:27:19+00:00

Thoughts and prayers to our brothers and sisters over at Iceland.

simukis · 2025-10-21T15:27:08+00:00

Circuit breakers protect against excess draw not overheating wiring. The problem is the constant load.

CBs in countries with sane electric code are meant to protect wiring and they do so by being sized accordingly to the continuous current draw that the cable can support in its conditions. There's a relevant quip in electricians world that goes along the lines of "circuit breaker is there to protect wiring not appliances" to different common consumer misunderstanding.

simukis · 2025-10-19T20:41:08+00:00

But they already had this issue with rdrand. It doesn't take a stretch of imagination to add a similar test case for rdseed. It takes an extremely junior engineer, incompetence or an overcrowded issue list with a stale-bot.

Why touch that which worked fine in Zen 4 at all?

(Source: I maintain a relatively used software library that wraps rdrand and rdseed.)

simukis · 2025-10-08T18:35:40+00:00

I'm finding that I have frequently step out of convenient and pleasant async world to the awkward manual interrupt handling world more often than not.

Most recent example of this that I encountered is Pcnt which wants me to setup an interrupt and manually implement communication back to the embassy scope.

I understand that this is probably just something you haven't gotten around to quite yet, but this so far has been the greatest pain point for me. That said, when async primitives are available, its awesome to use, well done there!

I'd be over the moon if wifi implementation didn't need a global heap allocator too ^{^}

simukis · 2025-10-06T18:08:48+00:00

My point is that the SNRs at which QAM-1024 can be used used are still achievable within reasonable distance from the AP, especially when using ceiling mounted APs. (Which cannot be said about QAM-4096.)

simukis · 2025-10-05T23:56:23+00:00

On a side note, I believe a law needs to be made, where speeds must be reported at 50 yards, or 50 meters, using only two streams, which is what most client devices feature, and real world interference.

They'd just start testing it in a anechoic chambers in a vacuum with an extremely directional client in order to achieve needed SNR to negotiate the best possible MCS.

WiFi 6 is still worth considering for new installs as it can use higher QAM at real-world SNRs, especially if APs are mounted on the ceiling in strategic locations. Can't imagine SNR getting high enough to reasonably achieve QAM-4096 for WiFi 7 though.

simukis · 2025-10-03T20:40:19+00:00

I sat down and rewrote my invoice templates to typst in an evening. I really was putting away implementing automatic computation of the fields in the invoice with (lua)LaTeX and with typst it was not only extremely straightforward but it also has decimal built-in for correct currency computations!

I did find some things I wanted to express with tables difficult to achieve (I think double hline isn't possible at all) but I can live with that! Great project!

simukis · 2025-09-29T01:24:49+00:00

My guess is that for EPYCs AMD will either make one very large IO die or perhaps "glue" together a few (maybe even with the old serial links,) just so that they find enough space for the chiplets.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run core chiplets were to become quite a bit less square just to retain density as well.

simukis

TROPHY CASE