quixotic120 @ quixotic120 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This will depend wildly on what you are planning to put onto it

That said I have a 2 cyber power 825va (I think that’s the model, not sure). It’s like 450watts each iirc. I got them 2 for 1 for about $120 new. One has my server/nas, for which it’s grossly underpowered (maybe 7-10 minutes of runtime, at best), and one powers basically everything else critical in my rack (modem, switch, poe switch, etc) and powers that longer but still not as long (my primary switch is a business switch that was pulled from an ewaste place for nothing, like $15, but it’s got 48 gigabit ports and 5 10gb ports! But it also uses a shocking amount of power).

They work great for my use case. I live in a rural area with a horrendous power grid so I lose power about once every 6 weeks. As a result I have a (very pricey, can’t recommend unless you lose power a lot like me) whole house generator with automatic transfer switch. When power drops out the generator kicks on and switches the house over to generator power which takes about 45-90 seconds, so I really only need these to keep my gear on for that period. Beyond that it’s generator monitoring and if the fuel supply for that is running low network gear is shutdown to conserve power

In a perfect world where I was financially independent I would probably upgrade the server one to at least a 1500va to ensure my storage pool could fully stop and everything could shut down even if power was lost

But most ups will work with monitoring in one way or another. APC and cyberpower work with the apc daemon (probably others) which can easily be implemented into all kinds of software and has support in mac, Linux, windows

Determining battery life depends greatly on load. Rough calculation with power supplies of gear connected, better calculation with something like a kill-a-watt or multimeter and taking a reading for a little while under load, add it all together and add 20-30% to be safe. APC, cyberpower, etc have calculators for this

Buying used can be okay but you do have to be comfortable changing the battery. Additionally there is the risk of something being wrong with it of course, they’re not bulletproof. They’re usually pretty decent though, the bigger thing is that they’re just really expensive to ship, even without batteries

I have a similar experience with the am6b+ and a similar sized library. Even on the stock android browsing my iptv provider which has 23,000+ channels has no issue

But you mention cec - does the x4q+ power off and on with the original display remote? That’s my one nag about the am6b+. Ugoos locked the boot loader and refuses to unlock so cec power on doesn’t work, every other cec command does though.

I just have it wake on lan by having homeassistant send it a packet when it notices my avr turns out as a workaround but this isn’t the most elegant solution and like 1:20 times it hiccups

How is the x4q plus? I frankly dont care about av1 (I’m a store everything in remux/flac person) but the x4q, theoretically, should have a faster processor than my aging am6b+

One suggestion I would make is to copy your install of coreelec onto the emmc directly. In my experience that makes everything a bit “snappier”, it’s easy enough to do, and only takes a few minutes.

“SSH into you device; then run ceemmc -x; type in Y; then type in 1. Once the process is complete, remove your external media and enjoy. To speed up CoreELEC installed on the eMMC on Ugoos devices, go to Settings-> CoreELEC → Hardware → eMMC Speed Mode and change it to HS200/HS400”

While this is absolutely true effective supervision and competent management make a world of difference with this issue.

Lazy staff continue to exist because they are typically inadequately supervised. As a result the extent of their behavior is not clear to management. So that needs to be corrected. But if that’s corrected (it could be) management needs to respond to the problematic behavior with appropriate consequences (eg constructive feedback, warnings, corrective action, firing) to shape the behavior going forward.

There’s a lot more to it; a huge part that is often overlooked is that management should also be providing ongoing consequences in a positive sense to entice the desired behaviors. Fear of punishment isn’t really a great consequence for operant conditioning. So we look at some other options: how do we create motivation to make people want to do their job tasks? How do we build morale? How do we build enthusiasm? This can be as simple as “if you get [x] done consistently you get [special privilege]”. Corrective and punitive action should be a last resort for when these systems are failing, even if you’re adjusting them to try and make them work

This is a cultural problem in the us (and many other places) though. We have this view of “I gave you a job and I’m already paying you so you should be so fucking grateful to me”. We love the hierarchy model. The idea of management and ownership taking care of workers is something that’s laughable or, at best, paid a pittance (here’s a small bonus, keep working a lot). It’s only very recently that companies have started giving a shit about industrial and organizational psychology/organization behavioral management/etc and even when they do it’s usually lip service to buy street cred

But ultimately it’s managements job to create an environment that makes employees want to work. The frustrating part though is that this isn’t really a problem to most management because the financial impacts are hard to measure. They’re definitely there and sometimes they’re more directly measurable, stuff like increased turnover as you burn through staff, but more often than not it’s stuff that’s far more subtle and difficult to measure like decreased utilization and productivity.

ugoos box with coreelec. I use the am6b+. Only format it can’t play is av1

stock runs a stripped down version of android with 0 ads that is very barebones so if you just want streaming apps this is for you. I use this part for my IPTV client but basically any streaming app available on the play store or that can be side loaded with an apk works

You can also flash coreelec and run kodi natively. You can just use the android build of kodi but using the coreelec build has many advantages; it can boot directly to kodi, it’s much snappier within the ui, and most importantly there are far less (basically no) issues with content playback. This option can basically play any file you throw at it natively. You can also set it up to stream files from a pc/nas with jellyfin/plex/emby but this is really the setup for weirdos like me that refuse to subscribe to streaming services (aside from an iptv provider).

Notably the ugoos is the only device, currently, that is licensed to playback Dolby vision content and actually does so properly.

Literally every other option, amazon stuff, shield, chromecast, appletv, pc directly connected to tv, the internal players of TVs, etc don’t play back Dolby vision content correctly in some way. Either they fail at playing certain profiles, they have issues with color accuracy, they flicker, etc. obviously this depends on your setup though, if you have a Samsung dv is meaningless unless you plan to get an oled at some point. That said even if dv is pointless for you it still does hdr/hdr10+ and all the lossless audio stuff/audio pass through

If Dolby vision and av1 are important to you the coreelec team have extended their work to other devices that have av1 support. Do research though because not all of them are fully supported, like some you need a usb Ethernet/wifi adapter which is dumb

Downsides are that it’s tough to set up, like you should be a tinker type person. This is a bit more of a pain than an apple tv or a shield. Also it’s not the easiest thing to get support

But if you’re like me and you’re super paranoid about streaming services harvesting your watch data and selling it, plus super frustrated that they continually fragment and want yet another $17 to access another library that you only want 3 shows of while increasing prices every year and still shoving an excessive amount of advertising in despite having you pay for the service, I would highly recommend just pirating media and using kodi/jellyfin to locally stream.

As an added bonus you get a noticeably higher image quality if you download stuff sourced from physical media because most (tbf not all) streaming networks have shit quality, much less likely to have issues with buffering or the stream dropping from 4k to 480p because the bandwidth wasn’t there for 4 seconds, often can get much better subtitles that are timed and syncd (and in the case of anime like animated and shit), etc. plus no ads, ever, no data harvesting (disconnect your tv from the internet so it doesn’t use brightness patterns and power usage to determine what you’re watching!), no corporate censorship (my collection has Daria with the original music and not the “soundalikes” because mtv couldn’t be bothered to relicense the music. It also has all the blackface episodes of various shows like community and it’s always sunny because I can decide whether something is offensive or satire for myself without netflix or disney to act as a nanny)

What you say makes sense but when people can see that there are decades of precedent for what you describe literally never happening it becomes much more understandable that people start to conflate vigilantism and murder with justice.

If the system consistently fails to provide consequences for an elite class at the expense of an entire generation what options are left? If you fail to stop a child from poking a dog you can’t really blame the dog for biting the child; you fucked up by failing to provide consequences at any point before the situation blew up.

I would not be surprised if this was the case or if they paid slightly more when all was said and done. Billers aren’t cheap

Remember this when they talk about how they give a shit about small businesses

You deleted it your post, you coward, but you said this was too long so here’s the summary.

Insurances have created a web of confusing regulations that give them a million reasons to take back tens of thousands of dollars sometimes years after paying you, the only real way to protect yourself from that is to join a massive healthcare network who has leverage of their size to push back against the insurer, but joining a healthcare network as a mental health worker means earning peanuts because our reimbursement rates are nothing compared to physicians so we have to work independently to actually earn money.

As a result we take on all the risk, we shoulder the financial burdens, we do the unpaid administrative work, all for an average of 70k annually as contract workers (no benefits with that salary so consider that we also have to pay for health insurance, retirement, time off, etc). And that clawback can’t be written off as a loss on your taxes by the way, whether it’s $1000 or $40,000

You do but at the end of the day target or starbucks won’t randomly take back 3-12% of your gross income. They also pay you consistently. I like my job but there are a lot of times I get real fucking frustrated at a period where my pay is super low for an extended period of times. Insurance companies are also assholes about paying. To be fair most of the time they’re on top of shit but sometimes they’re not and there’s nothing I can do about it. Sometimes they’re weeks behind on payments and it’s just like, oh well, that sucks, hope you have savings! But if I’m late submitting billing to them they will often raise a stink about. and this can absolutely be one of the things that later becomes an issue during an audit that results in them clawing back a payment. 0 sympathy if I am overwhelmed but if theyre overwhelmed? Tough shit, I’m getting no pay that week.

The last time this article was published I almost posted a reply to this but didn’t. Now I have time so I will. The denied claims are tragic, obviously, and this behavior is insidious. But something this article only touches upon at the end is what this system is really designed to do: extract previously paid monies from providers

This is such an important issue. I get why they lead with denied claims, because to the average person that is the issue that impacts them. But the above issue destroys mental health care systematically by burning out providers, slashing their income, and shuttering practices. And United is the worst, for sure, but they are not the only offender

What the article describes is what happens, generally. Something in the insurance providers “system” gets flagged. So they audit on their end. Then they may audit on your end. Or they may not even need to. They may find that an error in their system resulted in them paying you for months of sessions that someone wasn’t actually covered. Now they want their money back. They want it all, now. Or they do what United does, they audit you, and they find something that justifies not paying. They almost certainly will because the regulations are extremely complex.

Now you have a hell of a decision: do you spend a ton of time appealing? Remember: many outpatient mental health practices in the us are independent because attaching to a healthcare network means losing 50+% of your income. So if you appeal it means you’ll spend 5-10 hours a week on phone calls and paperwork, for free. Not to mention if it’s in reaction to an audit you may need an attorney so now it’s costing you money, and a significant sum at that.

Do you give in? If you run a medium sized practice and this included a handful of clients you could be on the hook for 20, 40, $50,000 or more. Do you even have access to that? Would a line of credit like that cripple your business?

Do you penalize your staff? You’ve already paid them, do you tell them what’s going on and ask them to pay back the funds? (no, this is unheard of, they’re all not making terribly much money usually)

Do you penalize your clients? In some cases this is genuinely what the insurance company expects you to do. If it’s a case where the policy was not actually active and they paid out in error but didn’t catch it for weeks or months they will claw back their money, guaranteed, and tell you to bill the client $3800 or whatever.

I had a client who was on permanent disability and they didn’t process his disability paperwork for some reason. By the time this was caught by his insurer it was 4 months after the time it should have been. 15 sessions had occurred, they asked for 1767.90 returned immediately. Now what am I supposed to do, demand he turn over two entire disability checks? Turn him into collections when he can’t pay because his (subsidized) rent alone takes up over 60% of his income and destroy his already wrecked credit? I’m here to help him improve his mental health, not destroy it, fuck that. So now I eat that 2 grand. What am I supposed to do? How do I balance that? That’s a 3% pay cut in a day because once again it’s put upon me to subsidize my clients care when the system fails.

I run a lean practice. It’s only me and occasionally I’ll bring on one supervised staff who is in post grad that I give a very fair fee split too. I still keep a secret savings account of 15,000 for clawbacks.

The reason is because I’ve had colleagues with medium practices, roughly 10-12 people in the group, go out of business because they get hit with a 40+k clawback that they simply weren’t prepared for. Or they just burn out dealing with that shit. Or they stay in business but now they no longer accept insurance at all, have ridiculous policies ($125 missed appointment fees! 48 hour notice required!) and inaccessible to anyone who makes less than 150k/yr

Then overnight a practice with 12 clinicians is gone and the community, which is desperate for clinicians, has 10 or so scrambling for new jobs and the 1-2 who ran it considering just getting a manager job at target or something. Then my inbox gets that many more emails even though my psychologytoday says “not accepting clients” because my waitlist is already months long.

Don’t even get me started on commercial rental prices

Oh if you want to de google it then that’s possible too

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?s=042c62c12ab4c37892a412e7afd5bd14&t=355147&page=5

This thread has info on rooting it (start on page 1) and the page I linked actually has people successfully installing Ubuntu on it. Works pretty well. I flashed android back because I ultimately just read on it and don’t use it as a tablet but if you want to use it as a tablet I think Linux works better. Yu can degoogle it without flashing Linux of course but that’s a whole thing and I don’t know if there’s a custom rom for such a niche device, you may have to figure that much out yourself and disable services etc. the stock boox rom is already fairly degoogled tho thankfully aside from the play store

? Depends on the app? As the other commenter said you can also install an alt app store. You can also just download the apk directly to the device and install it.

I use mine solely as an ereader so the only apps I have installed are Firefox and mihon (a tachiyomi fork for reading manga).

Games kind of suck on the panel tbh, anything that needs a lot of motion like youtube is similar. It works but it’s garbage compared to oled/lcd

Have same tablet, no. You can use the play store but you can also put an apk on the device and install it via the file browser or install via adb

No. For every one freeze dryer that is sold 1000 microwaves are sold. The consumer demand simply isn’t there outside of niche communities like survivalists

I’ve done a few of these and it’s possible to do it much faster without pulling the board

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHaw6w_Iw70

That said I would not recommend doing this if you’re not really comfortable doing this kind of work. It’s not a terrrrribly difficult repair if you’re good with working on repair unfriendly modern laptops but if you’re not good with that it can be quite challenging. It’s not as hard as it looks though, the main pain in the ass is the goddamn battery adhesive

Keep in mind that a slipped tool can be devastating (torn ribbon cables can be a nightmare and costly scenario, scratches on the logic board even more so), if you’re impatient while prying the battery and haven’t used enough solvent it can actually be quite dangerous, even stupid shit like if you push down too hard on a stubborn screw to gain torque you can break the lcd (which is easily like $300+ and a much more involved repair)

It’s also verrrry difficult for anyone but Apple to source a legit Apple battery (and people will shit on apple for this but literally every company does it; try to buy an oem battery for any laptop or phone. It’s not that Apple is good, it’s that they all deserved to get shit for it). Keep that in mind. A lot of third party shops will use whatever they can find and those batteries from aliexpress/ebay often have significantly inferior management controller boards and spot welds. You’ll never know but they’ll fail faster (and sometimes spectacularly). This is a fucked up situation and I don’t know what to tell you; you can try and find someone selling oem batteries pulled from units broken for other reasons but these generally are $$$ for batteries with questionable life. Plus there are a ton of sellers that are happy to say they are selling oem batteries with counterfeit labeling (and will often have “warranties” that say if you remove their counterfeit labeling to prove it’s fake you can no longer return it)

The big things are to somehow indicate to manufacturers that it’s not absolutely critical that a device has to be the absolute thinnest thing in the world. More importantly by far parts need to be available, especially things that absolutely will wear like batteries. This needs to happen via political pressure and regulation because Apple, hp, acer, dell, etc have shown consistently that they will not do this. They will produce those parts for a limited period of time internally and they will almost never make them available to external suppliers (exceptions of half hearted efforts like apples self service program, which has parts purposely priced just high enough to make it so it’s about the same as just getting the service from them).

This won’t happen. It’s consistently failed. Political machinations in the USA (where many of these companies are based out of) consistently favor corporate interests and lobbying

what if I read a ton of books every day but it’s all manga and light novels. trashy ones

when you worry about “plating”

This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.

Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about that most people aren’t personally impacted by”

But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits

The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking

I read a shitload of manga so I try to balance it with a book every once and a while