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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Fwiw mining and manufacturing isn’t as bad as some people want you to believe.

    About 40% of lithium comes from brine extraction. There’s a lot of lithium in the ground which are dissolved in brine - a super salty solution of minerals and water. They’re extracted by allowing the water to evaporate into the atmosphere and then retrieving the minerals from that.

    While that “wastes” a lot of water, none of that water was usable in the first place. It’s too salty for humans and would kill any plants or fish if used for crops or dumped respectively.

    Another 60% comes from normal hard rock mining. This is as environmentally friendly as most mining is.

    A small portion - about 2% - comes from clay mining. This is actually rather bad for the environment and results in a lot of atmospheric pollution. Fortunately, it’s a small shrinking portion of total mining.

    The other main minerals in li-ions are cobalt, manganese, and lithium.

    A large amount of cobalt comes from artisanal mining in the Congo. Artisanal is just a fancy term that means it’s not work being performed by a company at a dedicated mine, but on a small scale such as a single person digging an area and collecting it or a handful of people who run their own mine. Unfortunately, though, we know that slave and child labor are used at a large portion of these mines.

    Fortunately, there has been a large push to move to more sustainable mining practices. Some Congo miners have allowed outside observers to verify that all miners are adults working of their own volition.

    Other countries such as Cuba and Indonesia have begun mining cobalt and are also following minimum employment practices. As a side benefit, these mines are also the main sources for nickel which reduces the number of mines we need.

    Manganese is rather interesting. The current extraction process involves using natural gas to separate the components. However, there are nodules on the ocean floor which are rich in manganese. While these would produce less pollution to process, there are worries that removing the nodules would cause irreparable harm to the local environment.

    However, even if your batteries were mined in the most harmful method possible and your power comes from the dirtiest plant of all time, the long term emissions are still much better than driving the most fuel-efficient ICE over the same time period.


  • And while it’s a more minor issue, EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles in the same class, which causes more road wear and more tire wear (and more micro plastics to enter the environment).

    Easy solution is to move to Indiana. Our environment means that almost every day from November through April, the temperatures will be in the 30s-50s in the day and 10-20 at night, so the pavement is constantly cracking. Combine that with the lack of investment in infrastructure (Indy literally has a ban on new streetlights and stop lights going back to the 80s) and it doesn’t matter how heavy the car is, the pavement will be just as broken.





  • That would be great, but you can buy a $20 burner from a gas station that’s more powerful than those phones.

    The regular version uses the Allwinner A64 chip which retailed for $5 when it was released… Back in 2015.

    The Pro version uses the RK3399S, which is a custom lower binned version of the RK3399. Neither chip was made available retail, but the SK3399 was released in 2016 and only otherwise used in low-end Chromebooks and SBCs.





  • Death rate per 100,000,000 miles has been dropping a lot over time.

    In 1923, when it first started being tracked, it was standing at 21.65. 1970, it was 4.88. 1990, 2.21. In 2021, it was 1.5.

    It spiked recently, though, a tiny bit around 2015-2016 but then greatly in 2021. In 2014, the rate was 1.17.

    I do agree that the self-driving features are kinda pointless, especially right now, though. GM has gotten especially bad with their marketing, showing ads with people intentionally taking their hands off the wheel and not paying attention to the road while the car’s moving.






  • Same with my printer.

    On Linux, I had to configure CUPS. This meant finding out which of the 30+ different drivers for my printer model actually worked. Then it meant determining which of the dozen or so different “devices” would actually work. And until I got it working correctly, it randomly crashed.

    There are plenty of things Linux is better at but it isn’t that great at handling standard devices with any ease. I’m sure that I can do a lot more now with the Linux driver, but sometimes I just want to tell my computer that’s my printer and I just want this printed.


  • A few years back they dropped some clients (including the one for my old TV) because they were dropping support for legacy SSL ciphers on their servers

    TLS 1.0/1.1? Those were deprecated and dropped by the IETF with RFC 8996. You can’t even get a certificate using 1.0/1.1 anymore unless you are self-signing.

    You can also allow unauthenticated users on certain networks, usually limited to your local nets. But I do agree that doesn’t solve the problem. I’d love to allow users to optionally use local authentication with, eg, Authelia, something built in, or an LDAP backend.


  • I installed Jellyfin on my server but the Android TV app is just so awful.

    It honestly feels like a webpage from 2005 with all the blocky elements, terrible scrolling, and no way to sort.

    If you want to go to, say, Workaholics, you have to scroll through your entire library until you get there. There’s no option to go straight to W. And, don’t worry, the scrolling is very slow the whole time!

    The search seems to work maybe 10% of the time. I’ve typed in the name of a movie and it wouldn’t find it, but it did find episodes of shows that kinda match. I’ve typed in names of TV shows and it’s found nothing. Both times, the movies and shows existed in my library.

    If they can make it look and work better, I’d be happy to switch to it fully. All I’d need then is a way to pull the XMLTV file from Plex so I can record, too.

    The Plex app for the Shield has a lot of bugs itself, though. I connected my Shield to a smart plug because it froze the system often enough that I needed to automate a way to restart it. Unfortunately I’d rather put up with that than the Jellyfin UI.