Use refillable ones like Flame King. They cost about $20 and can be refilled safely for around $2 per fill. If you're near Sports Basement and are a member, they will refill them for free within some limits.
It's only the Pico 2 that has security features, and they are crackable, though not easily. Another alternative might be a smart card.
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/15/all-the-attacks-on-the-rp2350/
Per the article, this is about "wilderness therapy" camps. They send kids there and sometimes the kids die. I don't know the specifics.
Youtube livecast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRTfG_JM3Bs
Lichess livecast: https://lichess.org/broadcast/leela-knight-odds-vs-gm-joel-benjamin/game-1/vzQHuqnK
I might try that but I lose to in-browser Stockfish at queen odds all the time. IDK if Leela is likely to be much different. I've also lost some to Leela with no search, just one node evaluation per move. Tldr, I suck at chess.
TLDR: just use your phone. Yes people causing interference through improper use of the ham bands do get run down by the FCC some of the time. If you do it at low power on some UHF frequency with very few users, probably no one would notice if you didn't do it too often, but those frequencies are only good for short range communication anyway, so you might as well use your phone. The low frequencies that can travel international distances are more interesting but they are also more closely observed.
If you are ok with short range you can also use LoRA or meshtastic instead of ham bands. Encryption is perfectly fine there.
Spoiler alert: it will be "send us more money!". That's what they always settle on.
Yeah I heard that one before. Another was using a stamp but putting a layer of Elmer's glue over it, which stopped the cancellation ink from getting on the stamp. The recipient would wash off the glue and re-use the stamp (covering it with more glue the same way) to write back to you. I never tried that myself but I knew people who claimed to have done this in real life, with 1 cent stamps even. Obvs that was from before email and from when out of town ("long distance") phone calls were quite expensive for the broke nerds I hung with. So they actually wrote to each other with snail mail.
If anyone cares, the SP10 Pro and SC13A have been deleted from Sofirn's site. Dunno if they are just OOS or discontinued (Sofirn backing away from Anduril). SP10 Pro was kind of problematic (turns on in your pocket if you don't set a lockout) but SC13A seemed kind of nice. All things considered I hope they come back. SP36 is still there but for how long. I guess there's always Wurkkos.
Get a food chopper or processor (Ninja Express Chop for $25 at Target* is ok). Then just add some water to your regular meals and puree them with the chopper. Be super careful cleaning the thing since any food residue left will attract germs quickly. Source: I do this for my mom, who is getting up there in years and doesn't always like her dentures.
There are other religions besides Christianity that Trump might be promoting. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
Battery Junction sells these for $1 each or sends you one for free with any $20 order:
https://batteryjunction.com/titanium-keylight-colors
They look like generic and slightly crappy 2xCR2016 keychain lights of the type pioneered by LRI/Photonlight and its users. The intriguing thing about them is the mention of a microcontroller. Its purpose is to give click-on click-off functionality that I guess is more convenient, or maybe lower costs by using less precise plastic molding than the Photon II and its mechanical switch requires. But of course it makes me think of running Anduril in the light ;).
The product page has decent pictures of the assembled light, so I have posted a crappy photo of the disassembled light and its PCB. The MCU is the little potted chip-on-board thing. It might be possible to replace it and painstakingly rewire the PCB traces, or else possibly make a new PCB. The pushbutton itself is a little spring contact in the center of the board, going to an MCU pin. I haven't tried to measure the idle current drain. There is another SMT component on the board that I don't recognize. It's about 2mm*3mm and is thicker than I'm used to for SMT resistors, and it's marked "W4". A capacitor? Inductor? Hmm.
There is no PWM and no multiple modes, just on-off. I haven't yet disassembled a Photon Freedom to see if that has more parts inside.
Changing or reprogramming the MCU in this thing is probably not practical, but the electronic switching is interesting in its own right. Another idea that I had is to replace the led with one with full length leads that could be bent to 90 degrees, making a right angle light that could be used as a tiny headlamp. That is not really possible with a Photon II or clone ("Fauxton"), because those use the flexing LED lead as the on-off switch.
In fact I got about 3 feet of sticky-back Velcro at Daiso for something like $1.50. So that suggests a truly tiny headlamp with no strap. Just stick a velcro dot on the back of the right-angle light, and a bigger velcro dot of opposite "polarity" on your forehead, and plop the light there or remove it as needed. The idea is for the velcro to stay on your forehead like a band-aid through an outing of up to a few days, while not causing too much skin irritation. But, I have not tried this crazy scheme ;).
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2163520
18.5mm diameter, 7.7mm thick + 3.7mm for the flange on the back (see photo on mfgr page https://niteize.com/ziplittm-led-zipper-pull ). Output is about 1 lm, wide flood, similar to using a phone screen to light your way. Definitely a functional light not just a location marker. Smallest light that I actually know where to buy. Drops ok edgewise into NDUR match safe and of course you can use the space around it. Weight incl battery and non removable pull cord, around 2.5g or 3g. More later.
18.5mm width, 7.7mm thick + 3.7mm for the flange on the back (see photo on mfgr page, https://niteize.com/ziplittm-led-zipper-pull ). Height is 21.1mm because of the little tab where the (non-removable) pull cord goes. Weight is around 2.5-3g. You could file that tab off if you wanted it smaller, then drill a small hole in the rear flange and run some paracord inner strand or dyneema thread through the hole, if you still wanted a lanyard attachment. Without filing the tab, it fits ok "edgewise" into an NDUR match safe (20mm ID), which seems ok because the space around the light is still usable for matches, tinder tabs, etc.
The output is about 1 lumen in a wide flood pattern, so it's like using your phone screen to see your way around. We've all done that, it's not super bright, but it works. It is definitely a (minimal) functional light and not just a location marker. I calculate (but haven't yet tested) that the little CR927 lithium cell inside should be able to run the light for several hours at that level. You can remove the "pill" (16.5mm dia, 6.1mm thick, plus flange) from the outer housing if you want the light smaller still, but you may give up waterproofness and protection of the (0203 sized surface mount) LED. A layer of clear nail polish (what McGizmo used to call "poor man's conformal coating") might help with that. I don't have a precise scale nearby but the pill weight (incl. battery) must be under 2g.
Unfortunately the CR927 battery is a bit hard to find, especially from recognizable brands. Exell is one brand that is supposedly legit, and there is a decent ebay offer here (search for "Exell CR927"). I will probably order some of those. It seems to me that with a little careful sanding of the battery compartment, you could squeeze in the more common CR1025 and get a little bit more runtime in the process. But I haven't yet tried this.
I think if you want a zipper pull light or small light for practical use, the venerable Photon II is a better bet. There are also "dog collar" lights that can work as zipper pulls, that use a CR2032 cell that has around 10x the capacity of the CR927. But this thing is nice if you have extreme space constraints. It is the smallest light that I actually know where to buy.
Suggestions for Nite-ize if they see this:
- Enlarge battery compartment to use CR1025 cell. I think this is doable while keeping external size the same.
- Change black zipper pull cord to a more visible color like orange
- Put some GITD paint around the led if that doesn't increase cost too much. I might try that as a mod for my own units.
- Add a bigger version to the product line, using a 2032 cell and maybe 2 or 3 of those tiny LEDs.
Thanks, yeah, I'm asking if GMS does something special to avoid using battery power, while UP simply keeps a net connection open. Should the UP client use much power if it's simply blocked listening on a socket waiting for something to happen? There would be some TCP keepalives coming from the kernel TCP stack but would there be anything else? Do the keepalives themselves consume power? I don't know much about Android but I assume at this level that it's just Linux. Is that about right? So mainly I wonder if GCM uses some evil magic (e.g. through special arrangements with the phone carriers) that isn't available to ordinary userspace apps.