Fwiw Molicel INR 21700's are rated for discharge down to -40C (pdf) though charging only down to 0C. I don't see a need for a sodium ion flashlight just yet, but I'm posting anyway since I guess it's news despite being stupid.
Sodium batteries are mostly of interest for grid storage or maybe stationary home batteries once they get cheap enough. They are sort of marginal for EV's but might find a place in some cold weather ones. Having them in a few weird flashlights isn't going to help ramp up manufacturing volume compared to that. The real demand will come from power utilities buying gigawatts at a time, not a few flashlight nerds.
I remember the Eternalight and it went through a few nicer incarnations over time The designer was a regular on Candlepower Forums. IDK if the company still exists. The product was cool in some ways. IIRC it uses 5mm leds. The first production flashlight with a Luxeon was the Arc LS and I had two of them. I think the semi-custom McLux TK may have been earlier but my memory by now is hazy. I still have mine. Sodium batteries are different. Aside from the very niche advantage in cold weather charging, they are worse in every way than lithium. The main feature that makes them interesting is potentially lower cost per KWH in the long run. That's great if you want a 100KWH off-grid battery for home, and maybe it can find its way into economy EV's. But nerdy flashlights, nah, battery costs are not much of an issue already. The bigger light and fancier charging and regulation circuitry negate any advantage. We could already use LFP batteries if we wanted to, but we almost never do.
Wurkkos TS27 has an LFP battery and is beefy and advertised as a duty light, and it seems nice except then it has this silly RGB ring light that turns it into a fidget toy. I lost interest because of that. YMMV. :)
Added: I just looked over the kickstarter page for this light. The battery looks to be 10,000mAH nominal, size 32140 which is 4.7x the volume of a 21700. Voltage is 3.0 nominal but looking at the discharge curve at -20C it looks about 2.5V on average, so 25 WH. Not that much better than a 5000mAH 3.6V 21700 (18WH). The sodium is somewhat worse but still viable at -40C and I guess it might be beating lithium by then too, plus it has the ability to accept charging at -40C. I don't see super-cold charging as very important for a flashlight (if you're able to charge your light you can probably keep it at least a little bit warm), though super cold operation can be helpful.
Also, this is a 2500 lumen light which is a far cry from the old Maglights that were perfectly usable. The classic 2AA minimag was around 5 lumens over most of its runtime, the huge 6D was something like 36 lumens, and the nicad powered Magcharger was about 180 lumens. Surely for changing a fuse, a low powered headlamp is preferable to a huge handheld ;).
It wouldn't surprise me if there's not yet any sodium charging chip for small consumer electronics like this. I haven't heard of a sodium powered flashlght, phone, or anything like that before. The only sodium consumer device I know of right now is a Bluetti power station which has 900WH: https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pioneer-na
It got some attention at its anouncement but tbh it's 10lb heavier and $300 more expensive than the 1024WH lithium version (Elite 100v2). So it's for early adopters only.
If you want to charge a small sodium cell, you can probably program an MCU to deliver the right charge profile, along with a few small external parts. That's how Apple phones worked at least in the past. They saved a fraction of a penny by just incorporating some extra logic and code in their big ASIC instead of having a separate charging chip. It's kind of interesting that the charger was programmed in Forth, on a special Forth processor (b16-small) that they cooked into a hardware macro: https://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html . They hired Bernd (the b16 designer) to write the code and it was pretty intricate because of the cpu's limitations. I don't think I'd have used that approach ;).
I've generally heard that it's ok to discharge LFP batteries to 0%. You just shouldn't store them that way (or at 100%) for long periods. Keep in mind that LFP has maybe half the energy density of the highest density NMC batteries, and sodium has maybe half that of LFP. Sodium really doesn't sound that good batteries for portable devices.
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
Only living people can win the prize. If they die between the announcement and the ceremony they still get it posthumously. I'm pretty sure that has happened now and then.
"Let me tell you a secret: chess is the most violent of all sports. I’m a pretty good soccer player and a long-distance swimmer, and recently, I’ve taken up tennis, but I can tell you that there’s no sport as competitive – yes, I’ll say as rough – as chess. The only goal in chess is to prove your superiority over the other guy, and the most important superiority, the most total one, is the superiority of the mind. And there’s no luck involved, no picture card coming up at the right time, no roll of the dice that saves you. It all has to come out of your head. You whip him or he whips you. It’s as simple as that. Or as complicated as that."
--Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion
So make a lichess.org account and wreak some havoc over the chessboard :).
They put them into the lights, too. A very professional job. Unfortunately they wouldn't do my Nitecore HA11 (AA powered) or any of my 18650 lights. They said they were trying to focus on their core competency. I had never heard of a service like this before! Highly recommended.
I like the E3A a lot. It's the smallest 1AAA light that I know of, and the led tint and beam are nice. Unfortunately, mine went poof a while back: https://lemmy.ml/post/22807017
I have not gotten around to making more serious efforts to examine it and haven't replaced it yet either, but someday. The KC1, meh, it doesn't excite me that much due to its larger size. The 10440 battery format isn't so appealing either, imho.
I've sometimes thought of getting one of the tiny 10180 lights with a built-in USB charge port. I do also have a few other 1AAA lights kicking around so maybe I'll dig one out and start using it. The format seems less important now than it once was though.
Added: note that for whatever reason, the E3A in slate blue has a harder anodized finish than the other colors. So I got that one. You might consider doing the same. It was about $1 more, no big deal.
I haven't had trouble with the E3A O-ring but for such a minimal setup I'd consider a coin or button cell light, or maybe a 10180 light. Those can be much smaller than an E3A.
I guess see what the E3A page says about the finish these days.
When Voyager crashes while I’m typing a comment (an increasingly frequent problem), on relaunch I get a popup that tells me the text was recovered and will be waiting for me. But I can never find the original post that apparently has my text saved. Sometimes I haven’t had a chance to upvote the post before starting my ...
Content warning: this is something of a marketing pitch, but it is worth reading. It's about using CT scans to find safety flaws in 18650 cell manufacturing. It's put out by the manufacturer of the CT equipment, i.e. not trying to sell anything to most flashlight users.
Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn't have more 'toxic content', harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that. ...
Nothing against NPR but I don't want to spend 22 minutes on an audio. Is there a transcript? Also, confused Amanda Hess, the journalist, with Amanda Hesser, the cookbook author.
Does that mean they are enlarging the inventory now? As opposed to dismantling old bombs as they make new ones (modernization while keeping the number constant)? I thought there was a treaty capping the total number but haven't been keeping track.
On Monday, the Politico website published an analysis under the headline “Why has Elon Musk disappeared from the spotlight?” It found a sharp drop in the number of times that Trump posted about Musk on his Truth Social platform, from an average of four times a week in February and March to zero since the start of April. ...
As a flashlight enthusiast, you might be interested in this new professional battery charger and analyzer for checking and maintaining your batteries. ...
The manufacturer web site is almost unusable and doesn't have an ordering button. There's a "Where to buy" link way at the bottom, that doesn't work for me. Web search shows this is about a US$ 200 charger. Ouch. Thanks for the review but yikes. Also I don't want to install a phone app to use or update the charger. You are right that the missing features being important (PC interface, bidirectional USB charging).
More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024. To combat the rise of sophisticated conversational scams that deceive victims over the course of a phone call, we introduced Scam Detection late last year to U.S.-based English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users on Pixel phones. ...
I googled it and it's a higher form of number theory that involves things like"abelian extensions" and "absolute Galois groups". I've taken a course in Galois theory so I understand a little bit of that, but how is it related to number theory?
I found the wikipedia article mostly incomprehensible but it says a few things. You are probably better off asking on MSE or Reddit, sorry to say. Wikipedia's math reference desk has slowed down a lot in recent years though that's possibly another place to try.
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
At least here in the US, lots of mobile phone plans have free or cheap international calls, depending on the countries involved. Example. Some home landline plans also have that. So far that has been enough for me on the few occasions when I've wanted to make an international call. If more frequent, I'd use a VOIP provider, maybe Twilio (I'm sure there are others too, but I know Twilio supports this and has a decent API).
VOIP providers will often also sell you inbound phone numbers in the destination country, if you want the other person to be able to call you from their landline without it getting rung up as an international call for them. Those aren't always so cheap, but there are obvious use cases.
I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message "hi " could be displayed was baulked at. ...
To truly be safe from Signal’s influence you would need to audit the source code and build it yourself.
Usually I only install APK's from F-Droid, which always builds its apps from source, rather than using the developer's APK. I'm uncomfortable that Signal doesn't seem to be on F-droid, and I'm in fact hesitant to install it from anywhere else. I'm not currently set up to build Android apps myself. I'm a fairly unsophisticated Android user.
Telling the govt that you registered for Signal sounds like a bad failure as far as I'm concerned, e.g. if you are a user in a repressive regime. Do you think Trump would like to get his hands on a list of all the Signal users in the US? Probably yes. What would he do with the list? IDK but it has to be bad. So it should be an objective of Signal to make it impossible for anyone to create such a list.
Anyway, it sounds like Signal has wised up and is getting rid of the phone number requirement. I don't understand why people here keep defending the misfeature. I've heard such things explained as "system justification" but I still don't understand it. All of us make poor decisions all the time, but we should at least make some effort to recognize them, and fix them when possible.
Very interesting, thanks. Do you mean they use SGX (Intel's buggy secure enclave feature)? Any idea what they use it for? If not SGX, do you know what the issue is? AMD Epyc processors have something similar but different, fwiw. If there is such highly secret info on the server though, that makes self-hosting even more important. It also makes the architecture suspect.
Thanks. I'm not a sophisticated Android user and so far have just stayed with installing stuff from F-droid. If the official build matches the F-droid build, that's great. At some point I want to spend some time bringing up Android build tools, but I have too much other stuff going on right now.
Thanks. The more I think about it, the more this seems like outright evil behaviour on Signal's part to pursue user growth, similar to Facebook etc. Imagine that you and your boss are in each other's contacts for obvious work-related reasons. Do you really want Signal notifying your boss that you registered for Signal? For some of us it's fine, but in general it seems like a terrible idea.
Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.
I'd like to see a numerical estimate of how much data this is. But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.
I don't see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.
Do you know of anyone doing it? Other people have said there are difficulties.
You wouldn’t register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.
It is ok, in that era (dialup or wired internet) unencrypted http was basically as secure as unencrypted landlne phone calls. People still have unencrypted phone calls all the time. Typicalally sites would show public content (like product pages on an e-commerce site) by http, then switch to https for checkout to protect stuff like credit card numbers. Encrypting everything became important when wifi became widespread. Wifi hotspots would hijack DNS and spoof entire web sites to steal credentials. Also, LetsEncrypt made it possible to bypass the CA scam industry, making https-everywhere more popular. Public awareness also increased due to Snowden's disclosures.
The RSA encryption patent also expired in 2000. Before that, US website operators were potentially exposed to hassle if they didn't use a commercial server with an RSA license ($$$). But, it didn't apply outside the US and FOSS SSL servers existed for those wanting them.
You really have to see what the db is doing to understand where the bottlenecks are, i.e. find the query plans. It's ok if it's just single selects. Look for stuff like table scans that shouldn't happen. How many queries per second are there? Remember that SSD's have been a common thing for maybe 10 years. Before that it was HDD's everywhere, and people still ran systems with very high throughput. They had much less ram then than now too.
If anyone cares, this light was on sale for $10 last week (not any more) and I got one along with an H25L. The TS10 SG is great, smaller than I expected and a terrific value at $10. I will EDC it for a while. For some reason I thought it came with a USB-rechargeable 14500 but it's the TS10 Max that comes with a USB cell. It's ok though. I will probably get a D3AA sooner or later but this will do me for now.
I also got an HD10 a while back and I like that a lot too. Unfortunately it's being discontinued, maybe in favor of the non-Anduril HD12. So we'll again be in a situation of having no available Anduril headlamps with USB charging. Meh.
I noticed another review of this light at https://tgreviews.com/2022/07/23/sofirn-d25lr/ that has some useful extra info including a partial teardown photo, and a measurement of the parasitic current at under 1 microamp, very good. I think that review is of an older version of the light, since it has micro USB while mine has USB-C.
My brother had a micro-USB light (now lost) of this series, and it seems to me that the build quality of that light, while not terrible, was worse than the two I have now (H25LR and H25L. So maybe they got better at the time of the switchover. I still highly recommend these lights and don't really want any more 18650 headlamps unless someone makes a suitable Anduril one.
I always knew he was a hippie
NLD Wurkkos TS11 first impression
TLDR: I like it. Write-up will discuss a few nuances. Order link. ...
World's 1st Sodium-Ion Flashlight: Engineered for Winter (kickstarter) (for info only, this looks ridiculous tbh) ( www.kickstarter.com )
Fwiw Molicel INR 21700's are rated for discharge down to -40C (pdf) though charging only down to 0C. I don't see a need for a sodium ion flashlight just yet, but I'm posting anyway since I guess it's news despite being stupid.
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
Nobel committee unable to reach prize winner who is ‘living his best life’ hiking off grid ( www.theguardian.com )
Hydration spas are largely unregulated, study finds ( www.nbcnews.com )
The first comprehensive research on the growing IV hydration industry finds little oversight of invasive procedures like vitamin drips. ...
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
Inside the Volkswagen emissions cheating. Or: How proprietary software becomes malware that kills thousands of people through pollution ( lwn.net )
The net result is that real-world emissions are 30 or more times higher than those in the tests. ...
Blizzard strands 1,000 climbers on Mount Everest ( www.dw.com )
Looking for hobby ideas that you can **immediately** do for intense frustration/duress/anger that DON'T involve exercise? Looking for something like physical movement combined with mental engagement.
Hi all. One of my biggest issues is emotional dysregulation. ...
I got new batteries delivered for my Skilhunt E3A and my Home Depot 3AAA headlamps
They put them into the lights, too. A very professional job. Unfortunately they wouldn't do my Nitecore HA11 (AA powered) or any of my 18650 lights. They said they were trying to focus on their core competency. I had never heard of a service like this before! Highly recommended.
Rite Aid shutters all stores after years of financial struggles ( www.nbcnews.com )
Comment text recovery issue
When Voyager crashes while I’m typing a comment (an increasingly frequent problem), on relaunch I get a popup that tells me the text was recovered and will be waiting for me. But I can never find the original post that apparently has my text saved. Sometimes I haven’t had a chance to upvote the post before starting my ...
Finding Hidden Risks in the Battery Supply Chain ( www.lumafield.com )
Content warning: this is something of a marketing pitch, but it is worth reading. It's about using CT scans to find safety flaws in 18650 cell manufacturing. It's put out by the manufacturer of the CT equipment, i.e. not trying to sell anything to most flashlight users.
What's your favourite kind of restaurant?
From Bluesky
The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity ( en.m.wikipedia.org )
Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn't have more 'toxic content', harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that. ...
A return to visiting websites directly rather than searching seems to have been forced upon us. Would it be useful to build a wiki for web resources so people can find and bookmark websites by topic?
For example (just as rough proof of concept) ...
NPR Sunday Story - an approachable story on why privacy matters and the invasiveness of surveillance capitalism ( www.npr.org )
I know some people might not like NPR, but the message matters and can help someone you know. In particular this story touches on women's issues.
Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses ( www.wired.com )
The First B61-13 Gravity Bomb Is Delivered Ahead of Schedule ( nationalinterest.org )
How do you think this could impact the balance of power among nuclear-armed states ? Might it trigger a nuclear arms race ?
Whatever happened to Elon Musk? Tech boss drifts to margins of Trump world ( www.theguardian.com )
On Monday, the Politico website published an analysis under the headline “Why has Elon Musk disappeared from the spotlight?” It found a sharp drop in the number of times that Trump posted about Musk on his Truth Social platform, from an average of four times a week in February and March to zero since the start of April. ...
[Review] SkyRC MC5000 battery charger and analyzer – a worthy successor to the MC3000?
As a flashlight enthusiast, you might be interested in this new professional battery charger and analyzer for checking and maintaining your batteries. ...
Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations ( security.googleblog.com )
More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024. To combat the rise of sophisticated conversational scams that deceive victims over the course of a phone call, we introduced Scam Detection late last year to U.S.-based English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users on Pixel phones. ...
Migrating to Codeberg — 2025 — Blog — GNU Guix ( guix.gnu.org )
Trakt to increase prices to $60 for all users, including those on legacy, promotional, and grandfathered pricing ( forums.trakt.tv )
I modified the title to make it more descriptive ...
What is class field theory?
I googled it and it's a higher form of number theory that involves things like"abelian extensions" and "absolute Galois groups". I've taken a course in Galois theory so I understand a little bit of that, but how is it related to number theory?
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
Alternatives to Skype for international calling?
Skype is dead. Need an alternative to make international calls to landlines. Suggestions?
Synology Privacy Pollicy? - Lemmy.World ( lemmy.world )
Why does Signal want a phone number to register if it's supposedly privacy first?
I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message "hi " could be displayed was baulked at. ...
database greenhorn
hi my dears, ...
[Review] Wurkkos TS10 SG – mini thrower with SFT-25R ( lemmy.world )
The full review is available here ...
Wurkkos/Sofirn H25LR headlamp review ( wurkkos.com )
Rating: 4.5/5. ...