Isn't it an inherent problem with phones that if they are left on charge forever that their battery will explode? I've had test devices that I left connected for months together and inevitably the battery has exploded on every single one of them.
Perhaps, it can be hooked up to a smart plug and charged up whenever battery goes down below a certain percentage and shut it off when it's full.
> Isn't it an inherent problem with phones that if they are left on charge forever that their battery will explode?
Not necessarily, it depends on how much care went into making the phone.
Ever since Samsung had the unfortunate experience of having every airline announce that their phone wasn’t allowed on board (even when switched off), battery management has received as much attention as is possible. Most implementations today have multiple fail safes in place to prevent the chances of a battery exploding.
Today, several extremely improbable events must happen in a row to make a battery explode from just being connected to a charger 24x7.
Source: Implemented battery charging on a different Lithium Ion battery bearing consumer product.
Do a lot of phones have faulty charge termination circuits or something? I can't see any logical reason for this. Plenty of people leave laptops plugged in constantly for months without that happening.
That’s basically what I did for a android tablet mounted to a wall for home assistant control panel. Had a shelly smart plug that could be controlled via a simple http get request. I used tasker to monitor the charge state. When it reached specific state value, it would then make an http request to the shelly plug to turn off. Same when battery level dropped below a certain percentage.
Just watch out for battery degradation, at some point the % shown will not mean anything.
Even at 100% the battery won't be able to give enough power to even stay ON unless plugged in all the time. This is why we need removable and easily replaceable batteries as most devices are 2-3 years of regular use will have a degraded battery.
Yes - you're absolutely right. Eventually I'm going to see degradation in capacity. Fortunately, the tablet is a Amazon fire 10 tablet (rooted) and relatively cheap to replace. I paid $100 for it 3 years ago.
Lenovo's tablets are designed to be aware of this - after they've been plugged in for extra long (afaik 24H) they switch to battery-protector mode where they hover from 40%-60%. Hopefully somebody could steal this feature and add it to LineageOS or something. Edit: apparently you can do this on stock android with root[1]
Yeah, this is a concern for me too. I'd be more comfortable if I could replace the batteries in repurposed Android devices with a dummy passthrough that pulls power straight from USB-C.
Becoming a spicy pillow is the inevitable fate of almost all small lithium electronics batteries. Keeping them in the 60-80% range will slightly help extend life, but that's about it, unfortunately.
For fully stationary use, you could replace the battery with a voltage regulator + supercap combo like in this video: https://youtu.be/YfvTjQ9MCwY?t=856
This ensures that the phone does not get confused when powered straight from the adapter with the battery removed (provided it is even possible to do so).
Not necessarily; laying aside the issue of whether the battery is even removable, a lot of devices expect to be able to lean on the battery for temporary spikes in power consumption. I don't specifically know that this affects phones, but I'd be surprised if it didn't
yes, and typically at the very least a protection circuit that needs to be implemented or faked, or whatever.
i replaced a swollen battery on a cheapo hotspot with an 18650, but i had to remove the protection chip from the old battery and wire that up with my battery holder. if i was more industrious/desperate i probably could have used the one in the 18650, but that was more fiddling than i wanted
one way to defeat this problem is to connect the charger to a timer plug so that the charger can turn off at night. I use this approach to keep some lesser-used laptops connected and charged (edited) without so far running into the spicy pillow problem.
I and an acquaintance got identical Onn i3/4gb laptops (clearanced for 100usd). They left theirs plugged in constantly while I used the mechanism above. Three months later, theirs was suffering from spicy pillow, bad enough to rip the screw holders for the case, while mine is ok so far. I think the mechanism above is reasonable for shady hardware like the Onn laptop but I hope your Lenovo might do better.
i understand that this is the fastest way to extract frames, but it is limited by key frame availability in the original file (i.e.) you can only start the output from a keyframe.
in this case, it is important to be aware that the times you specify may not be extracted exactly. it will be off by a few frames based on keyframe availability. the only way to extract exact frames is to re-encode. :)
This is true. Do you have a use case where being off by a few frames might be a deal breaker?
Personally I've created dozens of clips using this method and it always turns out ok. It gives you about ~1 second precision on where you want to make your cuts. After I create the clips I can play things back normally, complete with an ability to seek to specific points successfully.
>> Do you have a use case where being off by a few frames might be a deal breaker?
Yes, in action recognition tasks (machine learning), e.g., if you have a large video with temporal annotations (start/end times where an action occurs) you may want to extract clips to sense-check the annotations. Being exact is important.
yeah it probably doesn't matter in practice. you may run into some audio sync issues.
but the ~1 second precision that you see is by accident where the source file happens to have a keyframe every 1 second. that may not be the case always. :)
it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy".
Slightly off topic, but a hack that i have found to read recipe websites on my phone is to use the "Print Recipe" link that most websites provide. It gets rid of most of the annoying ads, autoplaying videos and unzoomable text (or text tapping on which takes you to some random link because the page resized and you accidentally tapped on an ad).
The "Print Recipe" page usually contains just the recipe in a format which is easy to read without any clutter.
hmm, while this is cool i am not sure if it is a full-fledged replacement for the Google Finance "portfolios" feature. That lets you add the number of stocks you own for each symbol and shows you an aggregate gain/loss per day, etc. That was the main reason i was using google finance.
I have now transitioned to my own Google Sheet with the "=GOOGLEFINANCE()" function for getting the stock data. Works pretty well.
I'm no JS expert by any stretch but it seems pretty simple to add in code for that here. It'd be a chore to hard-code a big portfolio or one that trades frequently, though.
As far as i know, most of the outsourcing companies have a contract with the employee that will make the employee pay a huge fine if he quits them after moving to the US. I'm not sure about the legality of this, but a lot of companies enforce this somehow.
(source: i'm indian and i have a lot of friends who moved here on a H1B through the 'outsourcing' companies).
I am just curious. Wouldn't it be more easier to do this with specific devices than using the phones?
Each passenger can be given a smart card along with the boarding pass (or embedded in the boarding pass). The sensors could merely check for the smart card at certain points and determine how long it took for the passenger to clear security, etc. The airline can then collect the smart card back just before boarding when they scan the boarding pass. Seems like a simple solution that would work without much privacy concerns.
I've seen this done in airports before, only using a plain laminated card that you carry through the line - the low-tech solution. The card was used by the TSA to internally track wait times
Disneyland in Anaheim still does. They use it to update the wait time signs at the entrance to each ride and, just recently, their official wait time mobile app.
FWIW, T-Mobile in the US already has the exact same offering [1]. Their plan has free texts and 2g data in 120+ countries. Calls cost 20 cents per minute.
I am on T-Mobile and travelled outside the US late last year.
First off, I just want to say, the "free tier" of international data is extremely appreciated for two important reasons:
- Overage is literally impossible (i.e. no "bill shock").
- If you don't wish to pay, you get "something" for nothing.
So, now, the "bad." The reality is that T-Mobile's free tier is incredibly slow like "my 56K modem was faster than this" slow. A single modern web-site can literally take so long to load that my phone would fall asleep and then cut off the connection (meaning I'd have to start all over).
It is really only useful for push notifications and to check your email if you're really patient. Even for reading sites like Reddit, it would drive you up the wall. Looking at images (e.g. imgur) is a no-go and YouTube is definitely not even plausible.
Now, if you pay, you get more data per dollar than you do on most other big US networks and you legitimately get 4G speeds in many places (at least I certainly did). So if you pay you wouldn't even know you were abroad. And when you run out of paid data, you drop down to the slow speed again rather than being cut off (which is nice, so you feel safe to use 100% of your paid data with no risk).
So, to me, T-Mobile's free tier doesn't really change the formula for international travel. It just solves overage/bill shock and gives you some basic notifications and maybe email. Those aren't things to be sniffed at, they're legitimately nice, but people should manage their expectations.
PS - Protip: Restart your phone every single time you change countries. My phone got "confused" and would refuse to connect until I restarted. We did a cruise so a new country was daily, and I missed a day of data because I thought that country simply wasn't supported (rather than it being a phone problem).
Where did you travel to? When we went to France, I got great speeds (almost 3G-ish) roaming on several providers there (IIRC, SFR and Bouygues) in all sorts of locations, including very remote ones.
In the end, we paid $40 (all for calls @ $0.20/min) for 3 weeks of near-normal usage with 2 iPhones.
To me that's very much a game changer - previously I paid double that same amount as an accidentally access charge (forgot to turn off roaming on my AT&T phone). Not to mention I had to spend 30m with the AT&T rep to configure our accounts so we wouldn't get charged $2/min prior to our trip.
I have to echo this comment. I recently travelled to Japan and Singapore, and I managed really well on the 3G speeds I got from T-mobile's free roaming. I'll admit I didn't spend my time there streaming youtube videos, but I did use instagram and occasionally google maps, although it was slow for maps sometimes (then again, maps is slow here in the US too, it's most likely my SG SIII not playing well with the latest and greatest maps version), moreover, I tethered from time to time. At the end, I paid a pittance (something like $2) because I had to make one call. For me, T-mobile's free roaming was a godsend.
It was this cruise but in reverse (Aruba last, cayman first):
Ports: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida | Aruba | Cartagena, Colombia | Panama Canal, Panama (Gatun Lake) | Colon, Panama | Limon, Costa Rica | Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands | Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
When I paid for data I got good 3G or 4G speeds. With free data it was incredibly slow, like sub-56K modem slow, even at the same ports as the 4G speeds with paid.
Here's a YouTube video someone else took which accurately represents my experience:
Fun thing to keep in mind when traveling in mainland China: maps for use outside China are shifted by a few hundred meters, presumably in a lame attempt to confuse an invading army.
> What's your experience with Google Maps at the free 2G speeds?
"Unpleasant." What I'd strongly recommend is to download the map using offline maps before you leave. If you wait for Google Maps to download the data over the 2G/free tier you'll be in for a very long (10+ minute) wait.
I did not do offline maps before I left, but mostly we were on tours so we didn't really need them. But if I was e.g. exploring a city or doing something on my own, you'd definitely want to do offline maps if you wanted to use Google Maps on their free tier.
I used TMO's free international 2G (with a 2013 Moto X) in Japan for two weeks. Maps was not a problem. It was slower then I was used to over 4G, but certainly fast enough to look up transit directions and search for places.
I was very satisfied and would gladly use them again. Having transit directions made spontaneous travel much easier.
Does the slow connection work for background reception of email? In that case, one would never wait interactively for email, only be notified when email had already been received.
I was in South Africa recently, and got a consistent 256kbps using the roaming data on t-mobile. It's not 4G, but it's significantly better than sub 56k.
The T-Mobile plan only offers you international data if you pass a credit check. I applied twice, once by phone and once in-person at a store. I got rejected twice. I have excellent credit and suspect the issue is something stupid like my first name being misspelled (something I experience a lot). However T-Mobile employees immediately enter stone wall mode and it's completely impossible to debug the issue. Probably it's a company policy that they should never ever start discussing failed credit checks with would-be customers.
Anyway, I'll be damn glad if an alternative appears as it'll give me an additional chance to qualify.
T-Mobile uses the same name ("Simple plan") for their different offerings, one of which is international roaming with a credit check. I tried to get this plan, and T-Mobile wasted hours of my time and money on satellite phone calls to them and royally pissed me off with their extremely incompetent support. Apparently I was given the wrong plan when I signed up initially in the US, and then they tried changing my plan to the correct one, but it never worked. I wouldn't touch T-Mobile with a 10 foot pole.
It's not as many countries, but with 3 you can get unlimited data at a fraction of the cost (I currently pay £15/month with 3 for unlimited data, 5000 3 to 3 minutes, 5000 texts and 2000 minutes to other networks).
Likewise, although I'm finding that Telstra throttles me quite a lot. Turns out you can use any network in Australia (with no roaming fee from 3), so I've manually switched to Optus and my speed has dramatically increased.
in most countries i've been to (UK, Canada, India) 2G data came in handy for things like navigation. note that 2g is part of your plan and it does not cost anything extra.
nevertheless, they also have an option to upgrade to 3G data for a fee ($10 or so).
i see some generic posts about how ffmpeg is written in C and Assembly and will not be re-written in C++, but nothing about Rust.