I've had the same problem. I would just turn it over and thump it onto the floor. A thin mat would save the finish on floor and UPS a bit. I don't remember needing a lubricant in the past, but feel free to use penetrating oil or even butter. I have used files to enlarge the battery compartment before reassembly, not all of the batteries are the same size.

Can I get updates from a server without using firebase? I maintain an android app that interacts with a legacy home automation hub. The app is in the Play store and used by other people. (I'm being vague because I don't need suggestions for better hubs.) The hub accepts TCP connections for the client app to fetch a blob of current status and will send update messages for new events. Prompt delivery of the update is important. The first versions of the client app could make the TCP socket connection, run happily in the background and post notifications as event updates arrived. Newer versions of Android are trying to conserve battery and reduce notification noise. This takes away the long running Service feature in favour of data sync JobControl tasks that can run for a few minutes and stop. This doesn't give the time-sensitive updates from the hub. Before Android 14, I was allowed to use a timer or JobControl to restart a long running 'foreground' process with an always-visible notification to show the user that it was still running. Now I'm not allowed to call startForegroundService() from the background to do the restart. I've tried adding firebase messaging, but this would require my users to run an intermediate process to send their updates through a 'cloud' service that I would also have to maintain. (I've written it, I don't like it.) Is there something else I can do in the app?

Apparently we're supposed to be outraged that web browsers allow entry of 0.0.0.0 as a URL, but the part that surprised me on my desktop Linux computer when I tried netcat and ping, was that some part of the OS changed it to 127.0.0.1 and carried on like I meant localhost.

A bunch of people on YT were posting videos to tell me that batteries were going flat because their dealers had hidden GPS trackers on their new cars so the cars could be found and repossessed. This seemed a bit paranoid, but there were lots of viewer comments with similar stories. Even from people who had paid cash for the cars.

I received email from Chris (probably) for "Our CodeProject Community Survey 2024. Less than a minute." All of the out links in the email were blocked for me because they all had link trackers through DoubleClick and developermedia.com, so I'm already well over the promised minute on this. Blergh

Looks like somebody who should be on an FBI watch list.

This annoying paste thing can be fixed by putting this file in your home directory on the *target* machine:

+ cat .inputrc
set enable-bracketed-paste Off
+

It is documented in man 3 readline

Curl and mobile chrome appear to go to the right web site without redirection, but the site doesn't work well either. e.g. The privacy link doesn't go to a new page.

To be honest, I did that next to see if I needed to replace the outlet that it was plugged into. "Just how loose is this?" I should also check the outlet's temperature after the kettle boils.

My wife said "The kettle's not working!" – She's been claiming that it's getting old for a while. It's a "cordless" electric kettle, which can be lifted off an always-plugged-in base. Usually the on/off switch dies or the base connector wears out. The first thing I did was to rotate it on its base. She said "I tried that" Then I pushed the plug all the way back into the wall and it came to life.

The kids gave me an inexpensive drone for Christmas, which came with very little documentation – literally how to get it to go up and nothing on how to land it and turn it off. I took it to the school yard to try it out. It went up as expected, controls worked well, and - um - landing ... The manual said the auto-return button would bring it back from anywhere and land, so I pushed it. The drone shot a couple hundred feet up in the air and hovered there. (I may have disengaged the auto landing by pushing the button a second time.) Anyway, my answer to the question is "Get a tiny cheap one and try it out."

I've done the same thing to make old PC fans quiet again for a while. Under the fan's label there is a rubbery plug that can be removed to add a bit of WD30 motor oil. The plug is then replaced but the sticker can't because of the oil on one's fingers.

The simplest transistor to understand is the MOSFET used in most computer logic circuits. The name describes the construction and how it works 😋 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor is a thin aluminium on a thinner glass layer on a doped silicon surface. The doping impurities change the silicon's behaviour. The FET part of the name is Field Effect Transistor. When a voltage is applied to the thin metal layer (gate) the charge acts across the insulating glass layer to pull carriers to the surface of the silicon, making a greatly more conductive channel for current at the surface. A very small amount of power to charge the gate can control much larger currents in the underlying semiconductor.

I don't know what to say, either. This is very sad news, and you have my sympathies.

There are some tools like Invidious e.g. the one at yewtu.be which allow watching YouTube videos without advertising and without tracking. You have to know which video you want because recommendations are not personalised :)

My experience with a succession of 180 foster cats and kittens says that the kittens cannot be trusted without direct supervision – to grab one and run for the litter box when it started hunting. Ours were kept in a smaller room overnight, until they proved themselves and could graduate to the nearby kitchen. (We did much the same thing for puppy training, except the small overnight space was a box beside the bed.)

Our kid had a grade 2 teacher who used math as a punishment when his classroom got out of control. Over the following years we worked past the anxiety with mathematical activities that are not obviously school work, like music and baking to name a couple. Also: candy works well, even with adults, as an immediate reward for getting something right. We used M&M's on an empty music scale; name the note first try, eat the note.

I'm voting for number one; they don't want me to read the label. The teeny tiniest print I find is for the ingredients list on cat food cans, where I want to know if it has actual fish in it or just guar gum and crab shells.

I have an RFID tag that says "Shell" on it. I used to be able to wave it in front of a gas pump at the Shell station and then start filling the car. It was super convenient because their system remembered my credit card and Air Miles card. Which now sounds like a security nightmare. Shell stopped supporting it ages ago (15 years maybe?) and we've also decided that Air Miles is no longer paying enough for our shopping data. Was Gas N'Go a Shell affiliate?

While programming an Arduino device from my Linux desktop, I've found it quite helpful to fill my code with progress output to the serial port e.g.

Serial.println(" CONNECTED");

and then watch the progress from another window with tail -f

tail -f /dev/ttyX

where ttyX is the serial port of the Arduino device. (On USB it can change every time you plug it in.) You need to run the tail command as root or have added yourself to the "dialout" group. p.s. you don't need the "goto HERE"