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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • There’s a feature to allow charging from USB ports while a computer is off, Lenovo calls it “Always on USB.” That feature is constantly using power even when nothing is plugged in. To test if any ports have that feature power off the computer then try plugging in a simple 5v 500ma usb device to charge. If it starts charging then it has that feature and will drain power. If no options to disable in BIOS then as far as I know stuck :(

    I’ve worked on a couple recent gen refurb laptops (dell and lenovo) with that feature but lacking any disable option in BIOS. I’ve tried to get into the habit of plugging in whenever not being used but still end up with things empty more often than I like. Very frustrating and I think only hope is future bios update to give that option.


  • My first zigbee device was Sylvania (73685) rgbw led strip. On it’s own it worked fine but once I started trying to add sengled zigbee bulbs I kept having problems with pairing the bulbs or keeping them connected. Zigbee uses 2.4ghz so I thought maybe interference so lowered power output on wifi AP 2.4ghz band & even turned it off for testing but didn’t help. I think I read somewhere that sylvanias caused that problem. I unplugged sylvania led strip, reset & rejoined everything else and had zero problems. Tried to add the sylvania back in and disconnect problems came back after awhile. It was past the return period so now I keep it unjoined and plugged into a zigbee smart outlet. I sometimes have to remove power from it to join new devices or when I restart zigbee controller. Currently have mix of sengled bulbs, thirdreality plugs, sonoff plugs & sensors, and single aqara tvoc all working together fairly reliably.




  • Slicers for FDM are open source and lots of forks. The built-in printer profiles vary a lot but can be created from scratch. You can find lots online to use as examples too. I currently use Cura, Prusaslicer, and Orcaslicer.

    I’m more interested in printing plastic than tuning/upgrading the printer itself so I recommend a printer with automatic z-offset and bed leveling. Basic maintenance tasks such as cleaning, oiling, and greasing will need to be done on occasion no matter the printer. Beyond that I’ve only done simple retraction tuning.

    I started with Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. Klipper firmware upgrade improved speeds a lot. It wasn’t bad for a budget printer but lack of automatic z-offset can be frustrating so I replaced & gave it away to friend. Replaced it with Creality K1 which was a lot easier to get started with thanks to automatic z-offset calibration. Output quality is good but to get better would require upgrades + tuning. Been saving up to replace with Bambu Lab P1S combo so I can also do multi-color printing.



  • I’d recommend using distro you know best and/or most prefer to work with. I use the flatpak install of Jellyfin Media Player but there are also deb files available.

    I’m currently using minipc with Intel n5105 (or something similar) for 1080p HTPC. Debian 12 OS with auto-login & Jellyfin Media Player starting at login. I control it with pepper jobs RF remote but also have a logitech wireless keyboard+touchpad for it. Keyboard+touchpad come in handy when browsing media sites on firefox but some might restrict quality. Some of the newer minipc’s I tried required adding backports repo to install newer kernel for wifi to work. I had been playing with Debian a lot when I set up first one & been using clonezilla to image them so it’s stuck.

    Ordered a gmtek n97 minipc to play with and should have it in about a week. Going to test it out with 4k but it’s not a deal breaker for me if it cannot handle that well enough.






  • TechAdmin@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLaptop with long runtime
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    10 months ago

    I’ve had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It’s not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.

    I’ve always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I’m used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I’d still verify.