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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Nominally EU voltage is 230V, and may be 240V. In fact, it can be as high as 230V +10% = 253V. Higher voltage means more power for a given current, so nominally it’s 16A x 230V = 3.68kW, but you could have say 16A x 250V = 4.0kW.

    If your sauna is 400V then it sounds like you’ll be 230V (400V / sqrt(3) = 230). But the voltage can also be 230V -6% = 216V, so 220V is within scope.

    But yeah, standard voltages in the EU are either 230V/400V or 240V/415V. They’ve been harmogenised, but if you look at the numbers you’ll see the trick - 230V +10% is roughly the same as 240V +6%. So the range is 230V-6% and 240V+6%.

    You’ve got a 3 phase connection though so you might find you’ve got different single phase breakers on different phases (eg lights on one phase, sockets on another), with slightly different voltages for each one.





  • Back in the day your monitor(s) would have been drawing a lot more power (I’m talking way back with CRT monitors). Also, your PC doesn’t draw 750 watts all the time if at all - 750W is the max rating for the power supply. Even if you did have a very power hungry system (read: GPU) it would only draw that while running full whack, most of the time the PC will idle at lower clock speeds and lower power.

    Your soldering irons are probably only 25W, certainly less than 100W (unless you’re showing off). The big things are generally anything involving heating, but many of the things at your desk probably don’t use that much. After heating it’s motors. And, again, these things are generally not all on at the same time.

    Suffice it to say, there isn’t really any higher risk to the volume and type of load we have today than back when electricity was first installed in houses. It certainly should be said that the installations are much safer now than they used to be, where even a faulty install like this shouldn’t lead to a fire - if your cable is installed in ducting or kopex then even if a faulty termination heats the cable up there won’t be anything in contact with it to start a fire.

    But you should still get check these things checked out. The layers of redundancy by design are great, but you don’t want holes in the Swiss cheese to line up - that’s when bad things happen.



  • The main thing this article is talking about is supermarkets in the UK that lock all their sale offers behind the loyalty card. Until about a year or two ago, you could go in and buy things on sale or buy one get one free or whatever offer, and then use (or don’t use) your loyalty card on top (to collect/spend points), but now you don’t get any discounts if you don’t have a loyalty card.

    The article/campaigners are spinning this up into something about smartphones, because that’s how most people use these loyalty schemes now, but they still have the old style cards so that’s a bit of a red herring. The real issue is the way they’re tying their standard offers to the loyalty program, and making it more difficult for consumers not to get caught out paying full price.




  • Yeah, that was my impression also. Couple that with the travesty that was 13th Gen overheating and their refusal to even acknowledge it for so long, and I would say AMD are the wiser investment.

    Ultimately there isn’t that much difference in them for most applications, though. Bigger gains can be had with GPU, SSD and even just moar RAM.




  • When accessed by BleepingComputer, however, the link returned a 404 (Not Found), and according to several others who tried to access the URL, no content ever existed at the location from the beginning.

    This really doesn’t mean anything, it’s not unheard of for malicious actors to not set up their C&C servers until later on. This has actually been exploited by law enforcement in other cases also, they simply registered the domain themselves and took control away ahead of the attacker.

    There’s a risk with setting up the C&C that it could be traced back to the attackers. By not setting it up until it’s needed you avoid that risk until it becomes necessary.


  • Obviously this depends on the exact details of the patents, which are all in Japanese, as well as the specifics of Japanese patent laws.

    However, patents only last for 20 years, and they are undermined by public disclosure before filing. The first Pokemon game came out more than 20 years ago. However^2 not all of the features in the patents were present in the original games. All 3 patents were first filed in 2021, well after many of these features were established.

    The first patent is about aiming something and entering into a fight mode. This wasn’t in the original game. Aiming at enemies and entering a fight mode almost certainly existed before Pokemon (Final Fantasy perhaps). Furthermore, Palworld doesn’t really have a fight mode - it isn’t a turn based game but real time. Throwing a sphere is just one way to start a “battle” but there is no mode change between “explore” and “battle” modes because they are functionally the same in Palworld. Pokemon Go and Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee, which were all around in 2018, would seem to amount to public disclosure that undermines this patent.

    The second patent has more detail about catching Pokemon outside of battles. This might have some elements of Palworld gameplay in it. However, again we have prior art that predates the patent.

    The third patent is about riding characters. This has certainly existed in other games before Pokemon and before this patent. Off the top of my head, World of Warcraft had you riding mounts, Final Fantasy had you riding Chocobos, and Mega Man let you ride Rush.

    However the big issue with all of these is that these challenges are always better off done before the patent is granted. With the patents established it is a massive uphill struggle trying to get them withdrawn. Given that each charge is only for $33,000, so about $100,000 total, I expect a settlement will be reached instead of going on this fight.



  • Yeah I read this article on another post, I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

    From what I remember, he was running a few “shops”. These don’t actually sell games, but they can be accessed by a piece of homebrew software on the switch, and then you connect to the “shop” to download games directly to the device - this was done instead of manually copying install files to the SD card, installing, and then deleting the original files to save space; or instead of installing over USB. The shops were much easier, not least because removing the SD card to copy games from a PC required a reboot, and rebooting an OG hacked Switch could be kind of a pain.

    I think the “sales” he did were actually just donations that got you early access to titles that weren’t widely available yet. However, it’s generally when you start taking money for these things that the shit hits the fan and the hammer comes down.




  • 5 mil yen is about $32k. In total they’re suing for about $100k.

    I would imagine the 3rd patent at the very least should be invalidated - riding characters in video games predates Pokemon (MegaMan riding Rush comes to mind, as well as World of Warcraft [although I don’t know if the patent predates WOW mounts]). However the nature of patents is that once they’re granted they are very difficult to dismiss.

    The other two are more tricky. Throwing balls at something us a uniquely Pokémon idea, I think, and the aiming one would come down to the technicalities of the patent itself, which is all Japanese to me.