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Definitely. The high temperatures in a UPS cook the heck out of batteries.

Definitely not A123 cells. Probably China cells. That said, the battery might still be OK. I just revived 2 old Craftsman power screwdrivers which had dead NiCd batteries using A123 cells I got in 2006. I had to add an LiFePO4 charging board and USB C board, but now they work great, and are USB...

Correct that lead-acid is rated at C/20. Most likely that battery is still good for another year, at least. That's where the A123 26650 cells come in. 50A continuous discharge, 120A pulse discharge. Looks like 2 of these can fit in a 2.56" width. Put them in a 4S2P arrangement and you get 100A...

It's already at 83% capacity. Generally 80% is when it's time to consider taking a battery out of service. I guess ~3 years is pretty much the lifetime for SLA batteries in UPS service. BTW, LiFePO4 would probably hold 12.8 to 13.2 volts for most of the discharge. The nice thing about LiFePO4...

Basically, the UPS tells me the battery is crap when the red "no battery" light starts flashing. At that point when I test the battery it's pretty much an open circuit. Sadly, this seemed to happen within 3 years almost all the time. Doing a capacity test on a battery every few months won't...

Throughout history kids have been exposed to "adult" stuff, yet somehow managed to deal with it. To me it's a losing battle trying to sanitize the world. If anything, it's better if kids grow up knowing the world isn't all unicorns and fairies and castles. At least they won't be stunned when...

Yeah, but they're going for minimum weight, plus the bikes are new and constantly inspected. It's one thing to trust a carbon fiber bike under those conditions, versus after 25K miles on NYC's potholed streets.

One reason I've avoided carbon fiber bikes is their failure mode. Unlike metal frames which bend a lot before they break, giving you some warning, carbon fiber tends to just suddenly shatter when it fails. Basically, your bike is fine one second, then in pieces the next. There's an entire...

I might be OK going down in a military sub but I wouldn't have gotten in something like this if you paid me a million dollars. The only solace is they probably died within milliseconds, before any pain signals could reach their brains, or they had a chance to even realize what was happening. Not...

Speaking of things running always, I took this today: It's apparently been at least 206 days since our last power blip, probably longer. Last time I may have rebooted after installing software, not because of any power outages. The electricity here is pretty reliable. Only two causes of...

Kind of what I was thinking. If you have backup generators, a UPS like I described, which has a few minutes run time, is perfect. That's more than enough to tide you over until the generators kick in.

The use case for what I describe wouldn't be to execute a shut down. Rather, it's to simply carry you through brief power interruptions lasting usually only a few seconds. Sort of like when your lights blink off, then come back on not long after. It's still annoying in that lots of devices have...

Easy answer is the marketing people would have a hard time selling a UPS which only lasts for a few minutes at best. Most people are idiots who look only at bigger numbers, even though in many situations a UPS which lasts a 1 to 5 minutes would cover 99% of power interruptions. You could even...

In my personal experience lead acid batteries are sh*t after 2 or 3 years. That's one reason I stopped bothering with UPSes. Besides the cost, it's creating more electronic waste. And we almost never have power outages lasting more than a few seconds*. To me LiFePO4 are the only type of battery...

Well, I'll try swapping the old transformer-based AC adapter with a more modern switch mode wall wart. If the house wiring is acting as an antenna of sorts, hopefully the more modern power supply has enough filtering to keep any stray RF signals out. Now I'll just see if I get the chatter again...

I've had an intermittent problem for months, possibly longer, which has been driving me crazy. At random times I get chatter on my speakers (cheap, generic external speakers I've had for years). It sounds like the kind of chatter you might hear on emergency frequencies like police, fire...

I remember from back in my days playing with PCs of that era that most didn't take the 512MB sticks. I have an old Pentium II system which actually has 4 memory slots (most MBs then had 2 or 3). At least I could max out the memory on that system at 1 GB, not 768 MB. I tried the 512MB sticks in...

Family member has it? Yes, it's largely genetic but if a family member has it that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get it. Yes, it sucks big time for whoever got it. Sorry to hear that.

Scientology? Say no more. I really feel sorry for people born into ultra religious families. Nice of you to give them a safe haven.

Here's my take on this. I really never dated. I liked getting to know people I saw everyday in school. A bunch of us took the subway to/from school each day. When you spend over an hour a day with people, you get to know them fairly well. You also see them unfiltered, whereas on a date people...

I wouldn't be looking to get married or start a family, either. I never wanted kids. I'm certainly not having them in my 60s, plus I couldn't afford them anyway. My opinion is age gaps only matter if your biological age differs a lot. Sad to say, a typical person my age probably can't walk more...

I'm a member of Gen X spiritually, even though I'm technically near the tail end of the Baby Boomers. I can relate a lot more to your generation than mine. I think it's much the same for most of the people born between 1960 and 1964. 22 yo domestic partner and you're what, 47? Good, there's...

"Tall" is all relative though. I'm in eastern Queens, which is sort of like the "suburbs" of NYC, but I'm within walking distance of buildings taller than anything in Dave's picture. In Manhattan at this point it takes a new building over 1000 feet to noticeably change the skyline.

I hate to say it but I'd say most people are in that category. I never liked the idea of cloud storage without any local physical backups. You're depending upon a third party to keep your data safe. You're also depending upon the Internet to access it.

My house typically holds ~15°F above outdoor temperature. If it's in the high 40s or above, the house is comfortable without heating. Unfortunately, that means once it gets past the 60s outside, indoors starts to become uncomfortable. Opening windows can help to some extent, but the hard fact is...

This is why I never like PWM dimming of LEDs. I much prefer constant current dimming so the light is always continuous. Or if you must use PWM, pulse at something like 10 or 20 kHz. That would be faster than most shutter speeds.

Unfortunately, in this lawsuit happy society the authorities are going to be overly cautious getting people away from a fire. That said, not letting people retrieve pets (or having firemen do so) is inexcusable. If there were children still in the building they would get them. This is all why...

True but here's the kicker. AI is starting to come into its own now. We're not there, but even in its present state it's amazing. Think in a few years as quantum computing combines with AI. AI can try every permutation to solve a problem. We'll probably solve the fusion problem, cure cancer...

Science fiction has become science fact in our lifetimes.

I highly doubt anything will come along to save my mother before she goes, but it would be nice if it happens. I'd love to have my mother back, both physically and mentally. As for me, if I take decent care of myself I could have 40+ years left just going by natural lifespan. Longevity runs on...

Random question-is film even relevant any more, even for some pros?

I'm not trying right now. There's no way I could make it work with my care taking duties. When would we ever go out? It has to wait until either my mother goes, or I hit a lottery and can pay someone else to take care of her. As for meeting people, I'm in NYC. Once I start getting out after my...

Can't afford it. We're talking $500 a day at least for any kind of round-the-clock care. Add that to the cost of traveling, and being away for even a lousy week the cost would be north of $5K. Now's not the time to travel. As I already mentioned elsewhere, I'd probably also want a SO before...

I have any number of former high school classmates living in CA, mostly LA, SF, and SD. I haven't talked with any of them in decades, but I'm sure if I reached out at least a few might be receptive to me taking a trip to CA to see them, perhaps even offer a place to stay. Of course, I can't do...

Yeah, it is. And frankly I think they should shut it down. However, they're not. Even though it's a second tier airport, it easily gets more air traffic than most first tier airports elsewhere, and should have a rail link. Even more so because of NYC's horrendous traffic congestion. The lack of...

Here's the weird thing-SBN apparently has rail service, albeit a 15 minute walk away, while LaGuardia still doesn't. Just shows how screwed up NYC is when it comes to building infrastructure. Nearly every large airport anywhere in the world has rail service, but not LGA.

No, I never bought a camera to any of those weddings. I was never married, so obviously never divorced. If want to know the entire truth, I had my heart broken when I was 19 and just gave up on girls after that. But anyway, had I gotten married I wanted to start off without all the usual...

I've been to a bunch of them-all family members. My sister, most of my first cousins, some of my second cousins, etc. My only thought at each of them was I'm glad it's not me. ;) Not necessarily because I put off the idea of marrying entirely, but rather because the bride was far removed from...

My guess is all the tricks to increase density cost so much to implement that we end up with the same cost per TB. All most end users care about is cost per TB. Besides that, I don't think the volume is there any more to drive significant R&D of HDDs. SSDs in sizes most people want (i.e. 2TB or...

I'm an EE and frankly that's as far as I'd go on most repairs these days. Maybe I'd also look for blown diodes or MOSFETs, basically anything handling any amount of power, as those are most likely to go. After that, I usually don't bother. Typically a lot of the chips are custom jobs made solely...

Driving in cities is so different compared to everywhere else that I think places like NYC should have an additional qualification required on driver's licenses (both those issued in-state and other states) before you're allowed to drive there. The added training should include dealing with...

Philadelphia, Washington, Montreal are the only ones I recall. I may or may not have been to Boston. I honestly can't remember. I guess maybe add Newark and Trenton to the list, although I don't consider those large cities. I used to pass through Newark daily commuting to college. I rode to...

I don't like being in places where I either need a car/driver's license to get around, or instead have to bum rides off people. I have my independence in big cities where I can walk, bike, or take the train to where I want to go.

Same thing with me, especially when I'm not in a big city.

I never could have lived like that. I hated even business trips of a few days. I like to sleep in my own bed at night.

For the AMD APUs, faster RAM mainly helps with the GPU. I noticed higher frame rates on my system going from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-2400.

My beef with Amazon is the search engine. I search for one thing, and get a whole bunch of totally unrelated items popping up, along with a few hits for the item I'm actually looking for. Ebay's search engine always gives me only what I'm looking for. Are Amazon's programmers so incompetent that...

I get a bunch of them popping up on Newegg when I do a search: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100011693%20600545605%20600038463&Order=1 The big story I'm seeing lately with SSDs is the fact they're around $50/TB on the budget end of the market. I've seen as low as $40/TB with some specials...

I doubt contacts would go over that well with me, either. My uncorrected vision is in the area of 20/200 but I normally get by just fine without glasses. I only wear them when I need to see fine detail from a distance, like watching TV from the couch. I can ride my bike just fine without them...

For me personally a large screen is a non-starter. I need to sit close enough to the monitor to see it clearly (no, I'm not going to wear glasses when I'm on my computer). For me that's about 11 or 12 inches. A large screen would exceed my field of view at that distance. I've been using a pair...