Wait, how many Holywood films have I seen that was shot in Vancouver, Canada? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU

IKEA seems to have a new Matter-compatible smart socket. When paired in the Home app in iOS, I can control it from any of my Apple devices. Makes turning off the lights that are out of reach so much easier!

So these are the things that affects how we feel:
Temperature: hot/cold
Humidity: how difficult is for our sweat to evaporate, and feeling warmer than it actually is
CO2: breathing
PM2.5: how much dust and fine particles is in the air

So I’m getting mixed messages about how safe PM2.5 levels would need to be. The sensor says 15 μg/m3 and above is poor, articles say 30 μg/m3 and below is good, WHO says an average of 5 μg/m3 per year or 15 μg/m3 in a 24-hour period “meets regulated guidelines”

Air quality sensor I got 1-2 months ago is saying that the PM2.5 density is not good. This has happened before, but never this persistent between going to bed and waking up.

I don’t know how to deal with this without getting an air purifier.

A USB tester that would let me test more combinations of ports than just A/C to microB/C/Lightning by including B/miniB and additional USB 3 pins? Ohh!

Additionally, I saw RJ11/RJ45 testers, so seeing that I have so many LAN cables, I don’t know which ones are bad, though I had already rid of cables on a standard older than Cat.5e

So I have a lot of working power banks that are currently fully charged. Since yesterday (1 July), I’ve decided to just use them in place of using the wall charger.

So far it seems that there’s still a lot of juice left in them.

I miss the PS / PS2 era games when games were basically directly streamed from the disc without the need for an install. PS3 started the era of needing the game to be installed, though the disc does contain the whole game, and online only used to fix bugs.

So Sony has announced that all new PlayStation games from January 2028 (1.5 years from now, fyi) would be digital-only

I just realised just how old Blu-Ray is, so it makes sense. But it’s sad that they don’t even attempt to go for some kind of proprietary memory card as a new physical media medium. However, I’ve also seen the sad trend of the physical media being only used to only partially contain the game. I don’t mean a game without DLC, but something worse: only containing a bit on the base game and then downloading the rest, or just a code that points to a place to download it.

The company that operates ドンキホーテ is apparently called “Pan Pacific International Holdings”, with the headquarters currently at Dogenzaka in Shibuya.

Their shareholders apparently includes Family Mart and investment arms of other countries.

I do try to use otherwise forgotten power banks from time to time so it does not happen to me.

The last time I saw expanded Li-ion pouches was with the internal battery of my secondhand ThinkPad when I just got it. It seemed forgotten as you would only know of it if you opened it up, where you wouldn’t think of doing so if you’re not tech savvy and the presence of the external battery makes you think there isn’t another.

Another I remember was a USB power bank that dad bought, but left forgotten. I took it when it seemed neglected for months, but the effects that started the expansion was already underway. It was surreal to see how normal the battery functioned despite being expanded, but I know to discharge it and stop using it.

But why does it seem like they are on the rise as of late when the use of Li-ion cells has been around for longer?

Well, the industry has shifted from using 18650 cylindrical cells that were in laptops up till a decade ago. The cylinders stopped the inside from expanding, but as they moved to pouches, that safety layer isn't there.

Looking at r/spicypillows on Reddit, it looks like they have been neglected. Li-ion cells do not like being too close to 100% for too long, which is the case for when they were forgotten.

What does that have to do with power bank fires? The expanding pouch would cause the anode and cathode to bridge a short, with nothing to limit/break the dangerously high amperage flow, hence generating so much heat that it starts a fire.

With airlines getting paranoid about exploding power banks, I think what I should pack for travel should be more towards getting a charger that wouldn't tie me down to a spot for too long.

As a reminder, the battery capacity limit of 100Wh/160Wh only applies to lithium-ion batteries.

What are examples that are 100Wh and under? Power banks rated for 27,000mAh, most laptops. (Fyi, if something with Li-ion that isn't a power bank does list capacity in mAh, you should be looking at the Wh instead, or (mAh/1000)*voltage

The French word “maintenant” (now) has way less syllables than I thought, and very different.

Initially: メインテナント
Actually: モントロン

I’ve been spending too much time thinking of getting a 100W USB-PD charger that has a display.

Reasons for: would tell me what’s going on, has more USB C ports than I would find on most chargers, doesn’t interrupt power supply when a new device is plugged in, would be nice to not need as many charge bricks for travel

Reasons against: already have another 100W charger (no display) that has AC pass-through to plug in more chargers

It feels like we are in a dystopian world where we had diverged from the better path a long time ago.

I get that A.I. can be helpful to improve machine translation or summaries a wall of text (though I’m still skeptical on what it left out), or optimising charging.

But oh boy, Google puts this A.I. crap on your search page results, and Microsoft putting CoPilot everywhere including where it isn’t needed.

Have we reached the early stages of what we saw in old sci-fi movies depicting the 22nd century? After all, we are technically in the second quarter of the 21st century…

I felt silly buying the iPhone 17 earlier this year (not at last year’s launch) when the 14PM still works fine, but the generative A.I. craze driving everything memory related up, and rumours of the next non-Pro not due until 2027, it seemed like anything after the 17 would cost a lot more.

Guess what? Apple just announced a big price hike across the board. Numbers-wise, it’s mostly the high-end Macs, while percentage-wise, it’s the TV 4K.

I’m going crazy over people using “the eighteen hundreds” for events that are clearly in the later half of the 19th century.

The problem with cashless payments is using a standard that is quite a hassle or impossible for non-local visitors to use.

Even more of a problem are how they list Visa and MasterCard as acceptable payments, but really only work for locally-issued cards. (Of course, assuming you had enabled overseas transactions and hadn’t hit the transactional limit which can contribute to why it wouldn’t work.)