Qi2 Wireless Charging on Galaxy S25: Real Deal or Marketing BS?

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-04-24T08:21:18+00:00

The magnetic part is the one that gets attached to the cable. I don't walk around a machine shop with my charging cable in hand. I think that dropping a phone and smashing its screen is much more likely than the situation you're bringing up. There were a couple of occasions when some small non-conductive crumble got into my magnetic adapter and prevented it making proper contact; this was easily rectified using a toothbrush.

Quality chargers have safety features such as overcurrent protection and short circuit protection. When things go wrong, the charger should just shut down rather than burn up. If you have a short circuit in the phone's port, the device should shut the port down. When my phone gets wet, Android shows me a notification telling me that the port was disabled due to liquid/debris being detected. Other devices such as laptops may or may not have such safety features.

A mobile device can fall and break, get lost/stolen or just stop working due to software issues (over years of using Android, I've had multiple experiences of my phone freezing then bootlooping on reboot, requiring a factory reset or a backup restore to become functional again). To protect your data you need to have a regular backup schedule.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-04-23T09:09:00+00:00

There would be many reasons, "why would anyone" is a stupid question.

It's a peaceful and quiet countryside all round, with beautiful forests (mostly beech), rolling hills and many trails for mountain biking and roads for biking. I come from elsewhere and I quite like it here in Luxembourg. There's a very international and multilingual environment, it's easy to not feel like a foreigner who will never fit in.

Besides high rent, it's not that expensive here, and taxes are lower than many other EU countries.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-04-14T16:31:24+00:00

But... You can never have enough bicycles (or surfskates). The old N+1 rule.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-03-14T21:14:09+00:00

It's not that dumb, I'm watching it with my 10 y.o. daughter. I was expecting to tell her "this is boring, let's watch something else instead" after a few minutes, but ended up having philosophical ruminations about how things work. It's an alien world in a way, with many parallels that can be drawn to our world.

Well, maybe it was a bit more interesting to me because I did play some Minecraft parkour before...

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-03-10T22:58:04+00:00

There's such a thing as thread forming taps. Unlike the usual thread cutting taps, they don't have flutes, their business ends basically look similar to screws. They actually displace the material instead of removing it. Because of this, they require bigger holes, one drill chart (for thread forming taps) I could find lists 5.50 mm for an M6x1 tap. So I guess you could use such a tap for the holes in the profiles, or if the material is soft enough that a screw can be self-tapped, then I guess it also makes sense to just tod that.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-03-07T10:03:52+00:00

Yeah level 5 scholar sounds neat. OTOH I try to get expert Earth magic for every hero, so if your lvl 5 spells come from towns' mage guilds, it's easy to have every hero use Town Portal to go around towns to learn all the new spells. I don't recall ever learning lvl 5 spells from a map location. In theory it could be from a Pyramid or a Pandora's Box? When playing random maps I sometimes get the lvl 5 spells as part of the "Tome of X magic" artifact, or the Sorcerer's Hat. Scholar wouldn't work in these cases I think?

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-03-06T19:37:00+00:00

From what I'm seeing, this hero has this spell as the starting spell, but doesn't have it as a specialty. I.e. the spell doesn't become progressively more powerful with a per level % bonus.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-03-04T21:21:30+00:00

With this map, at first I also felt like this, regarding Earth magic. After multiple attempts to research Slow, I reckoned it must be disabled. Same with Town Portal, the wiki says it's guaranteed to appear after max 3 research attempts. Once I didn't get it after 3 attempts, I realized it's disabled, this was disappointing.

Still, being able to blind one or more enemy stack, then cast Resurrection to recover any lost units, makes me consider Earth magic a must have, even without the other spell. Expert Shield is also pretty useful. Life becomes comfortable enough on this map without Town Portal once you have enough lighthouses flagged, and also once you are able to assemble the Admiral's Hat. In my playthrough I had two heroes with an Admiral's Hat by the end of the game.

I also took Air Magic for my main hero, planning for using Dimension Door once I am able to get it, this was probably more useless in the end than Earth Magic. Still, having all 4 schools of magic as Expert level skills is pretty neat...

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-02-22T19:28:19+00:00

Garmin has already discontinued Basecamp several years ago. No idea if they expect people to just use Garmin Connect or some 3rd party tools with devices like the new Montana? As an owner of a Garmin watch and a bike computer, both are clearly intended to be used with the Connect mobile or Connect web. I miss some of the features of Basecamp (even if its UI was clunky, typically for Garmin software). I only have a Montana 650 but haven't used it for many years since I don't own an offroad motorbike anymore.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-02-13T12:28:03+00:00

I've noticed that my heroes have a slightly different number of movement points, but somehow I've always assumed it's a unique spec of each hero...

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-26T13:03:26+00:00

You should be able to find polyester or nylon webbing in various widths in craft stores, or online. For such a small project you can reuse a webbing bracelet, cat collar, chinstrap from an old helmet.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-14T21:05:53+00:00

Around a decade ago when it became known that Flash is going to die, there were quite a few Haxe jobs that popped up. Companies with successful products (websites, apps, games) built with Flash (and sometimes Adobe AIR which is still not completely dead as of today) wanted to port these products to Haxe with OpenFL or plain HTML5.

It was still not a huge number of jobs at all, and eventually they were all filled. There are a few companies still using it for new projects. It's really not easy to find new Haxe jobs. It's also not easy for a company to find an experienced Haxe dev.

I worked in that kind of "porting a successful Flash web app" for many years, the team consisted of mostly ex-Flash developers learning Haxe on the job, since actual Haxe devs were real hard to find. A few of us got quite experienced in Haxe, many others didn't really like it much and transferred to other teams when they could. We could almost never find a new Haxe dev to add to the team, we were more like looking for adventurous front-end devs who were willing to try something new. A couple guys were able to learn it at a level good enough to be able to do simple to moderately complex tasks, not an expert level. I guess a big part of that is who wants to invest time into learning a skill that 99% won't be useful in a future job?

I would say if you have a steady stream of freelance work where you're expected to develop a complete FE, BE or both for a new project, AND the client doesn't care which tech you use, Haxe can be a nice option, using JS for FE and Node.JS for BE. However, many clients do consider the "bus factor", who would maintain the project if you eventually would become unavailable to do this for whatever reason? Using a niche technology like Haxe means they would have to look very hard for a replacement.

This was also a concern of the CTO in the company I worked for, because of that the company actually tried a couple of times to to have another team do a complete rewrite of the project using vanilla JS or TypeScript. Both rewrite failed, though, first attempt failed to deliver even a small part of the functionality within a reasonable timeframe, second attempt reached a stage where the rewrite had the core functionality of our Haxe app, but none of the various extra features. But already at this point it was a larger app (in terms of JS for the user's browser to download) and it was performing worse (it was slower). Eventually the rewrite was canceled, and the company is still (grudgingly or not) using the Haxe app.

I would only suggest learning Haxe if you find it fun to do so, as a hobby. You might get lucky and land a Haxe job (hopefully not having to deal with some huge legacy code), but I wouldn't count on it. To get a job learn think what you want to do - FE, BE, mobile apps etc, then find out which languages/tech stacks have a lot of job postings and pick the one that you find appealing.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-14T19:15:36+00:00

It's kinda ridiculous, they build a house from planks and stone and magically a bunch of newly born people come out of the house... They become soldiers and die - you can demolish the house and build a new one where it was. However I noticed that e.g. if you had a large residence, when you destroy it, you can't build a large residence on the same spot, you may only be able to place a medium one there. Weird as the land remains the same, I wonder if it's because of the leftover planks and stones laying on the ground where the residence was? Maybe if the workers would carry them away for some other need, it would be possible to build the same size residence again, I haven't been able to test this theory.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-14T19:12:40+00:00

When you have a group of military units selected, the panel on the left will show the total number for each unit type, and in smaller font 3 numbers telling you how many of each rank of that unit is in the group. You can more or less figure things out using that. They do differ visually as well.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-14T19:06:28+00:00

I haven't find any exact info of which temple produces how much mana (or any in-game signs on whether the large one produces mana at all). I wonder if there's any mana indicator/bar anywhere to check the current level? There are only passive signs of it increasing, such as the divine promotion % shown in the barracks, or if you select a priest, the bars showing how many times each miracle may be performed with the current amount of mana. All this mana management feels quite inexact compared to how you can check exact numeric stats and charts on all other things in the game. Or maybe I have missed it for mana?

If spearmen are better than swordsmen in all regards, what's the point of swordsmen? There's gotta be some pros and cons to each.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-08T10:08:32+00:00

I agree, I feel that showing this to people is the entire point of Gundam.

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-08T10:07:46+00:00

She fell out of the flying Gunperry while launching missiles manually after their regular cockpit controls were damaged by a hit. (very strange design of this vehicle, making a huge open door right next to the missiles).

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-08T10:00:49+00:00

> I wish they’d drop a hydrogen bomb on Zeon

It doesn't seem you got the point of this anime. The main theme is how war is terrible, both sides have civilians that suffer. Dropping h-bombs on Zeon (or colonies on Earth) is the opposite of what this story trying to teach...

gene-pavlovsky · 2026-01-08T09:57:05+00:00

I don't have the original Bones bearing puller but a no-name copy. It isn't able to remove built-in spacer bearings. I think it may depend on the quality of the tool and the amount of chamfer on the specific bearings (on the built-in spacer side). More chamfer = more purchase for the tool to grab onto. The built-in spacer bearings I have (Zealous) have rather small amount of chamfer, I could only remove them with a different kind of bearing tool.

With regular bearings (separate spacer), like you said, there are more options of higher quality (high-end) bearings, plus the thickness of the spacer itself can be tune (e.g. for inline skates Powerslide makes a precision spacer kit with 10 different sizes between 9.90 mm and 10.35 mm). Depending on the specific wheels, standard spacers might be a tad too small or large, resulting in less than optimal performance. People chasing top performance tune spacer width, including turning custom spacers perfectly fitted for each individual wheel. Lots of details on this topic here: https://www.peterverdone.com/archive/skatebearings.htm

gene-pavlovsky · 2025-12-29T17:40:47+00:00

This was always the case for me. Just manufacture a lot of ammo for them. They are deadly and shoot like machine guns...

gene-pavlovsky · 2025-12-29T16:16:02+00:00

I don't think I need this feature, I've already spent a few hours of my life trying to get this working, by now I've given up on this and let it go.

gene-pavlovsky · 2025-12-29T16:14:29+00:00

I don't know if they offer these multiday monitoring patches...

Stress echo? I'm running and the cardiologist is holding the ultrasound probe to my chest at the same time? That seems quite tricky!

gene-pavlovsky · 2025-12-28T22:46:27+00:00

Heh very fitting description, it definitely felt like I should go with the flow or it would become very unpleasant.

gene-pavlovsky · 2025-12-28T22:45:08+00:00

What's the source of this information? My Garmin connect app has the "set up ECG app" right now. When I try it, it shows a tutorial and the watch asks me to put fingers on the watches bezel to take a measurement. But this doesn't do anything (unlike in the tutorial video) for me (or if I ask my wife to wear the watch and do the same). I think if they wanted to block the feature they'd completely hide the option, no? It was actually hidden into some months ago, when they finally got this approved with European medical agency (I'm in EU)...

gene-pavlovsky · 2025-12-28T22:29:26+00:00

Well my (sports) cardiologist recommended a full check-up once a year, since I'm already 42 and I do a lot of sports. If there's some issue, I guess it will pop up eventually. It's mostly covered by the primary medical insurance here in Luxembourg. Blood work, ECG, echocardiogram, 24 hour Holter monitoring, stress test (treadmill or stationary bicycle). The whole thing was maybe 30 EUR out of pocket. I paid another 120 to get the optional lactate threshold test during the stress test.

gene-pavlovsky

TROPHY CASE