Zak

For background, it's hard to make a flashlight that works well on both AA batteries (0.8-1.7V potential operating range) and 14500 Li-ion batteries (2.8-4.2V operating range) given that white LEDs need about 3V.

For a long time, companies would make lights designed for AA using a boost driver that increases the output voltage, do just enough so it wouldn't burn out with excessive input voltage, and say that 14500 size Li-ion was "supported". Max output would, indeed be brighter, but low modes were usually far too high, and the flashlights could easily damage batteries that didn't have over-discharge protection.

The Skilhunt M150 was one of the first lights to do a substantially better job. Using a Li-ion battery, it sent the power through a variable-output linear regulator so both battery types could have reasonable modes, and it would shut off to prevent over-discharge. Several competitors use a similar approach today, but linear regulators are inefficient; they just turn the excess voltage to heat.

The ideal solution is either to use a higher-voltage LED configuration and boost the output voltage for both battery types, or to use a driver that can both boost (increase) and buck (decrease) voltage efficiently. The Emisar D3AA is the only light on the market doing AA/14500 with a high-voltage LED configuration (three in series for ~9V), and I believe the new M150 will be the first one using the buck/boost approach (though it's possible Zebralight has done it in the past).

Some friends have safety concerns that mean they need to appear digitally as if they're inside the USA while being elsewhere physically. Standard commercial VPNs are easy to detect (else I'd recommend Mullvad), so they need an option that looks like a residential connection.

They could potentially DIY it by leaving a VPN server at a relative's house, but I'm asking here for subscription services. It's best if they have a Mac OS app that's foolproof, with a clear visual indication that it's in use, and a feature to block traffic if the VPN is disconnected.

tl;dr: what's the closest residential VPN to Mullvad?

In honor of [email protected] reaching 3000 members (yes, I know that was a couple weeks ago), I'm giving away this Acebeam T35 swapped to a 3000 Kelvin, 95 CRI Luminus SFT40. While not as bright as the original 5000K, low-CRI LED, it's sure to satisfy anyone who misses the incandescent look, but likes LED power.

Only accounts that have made a post or comment to [email protected] prior to this post may enter. You should have a shipping address in the USA or EU, which can be a package forwarding company if necessary. Entry ends on Februrary 14 2025 at 20:00 UTC.

To enter, leave a top level comment on this post. I will select the winning entry using a random number generator next Friday.

I don't actually want to do this right now, but I do want to know if it's really decentralized yet. Completely looks like it means each of:

• A client ✅
• A personal data server ✅
• A relay ❓
• Labelers ✅
• Feed generators ✅

It looks like the relay might be the bottleneck. If I'm understanding the protocol correctly, a relay could consume less than the whole network so it doesn't have to be ridiculously expensive to operate, but I'm not finding examples of people doing it.

I fear if I carry anything else today, I'll lose it or cut myself with it.

• Old leather wallet
• Flashlight (Skilhunt H150)
• Knife (Spyderco UKPK)
• Pepper spray (Sabre Red, with a pocket clip from a random flashlight)
• Phone (Pixel 4A)
• Keys, and another flashlight (Skilhunt EK1)
• Flash drive (Sandisk 128gb)
• 1.38€

I've been self-hosting email with Maddy for a bit, but haven't shared any of the addresses widely yet in part because I haven't set up a spam filter. I'm pleased with Maddy; there's much less to learn to get a server up and running with sane default behavior than with the email software of old.

Ideally, I'd like to go beyond just spam filtering and have something with arbitrary categories like newsletters and password resets. I would prefer that it learn categories when I move messages to IMAP folders from a mail client. Maddy can feed messages into arbitrary programs and pick a destination folder based on their output.

Web searches turn up a ton of classification programs, most of which seem to be more interested in playing accuracy golf with well-known corpora than expanding functionality beyond simple spam filtering.

I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I'm able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it's being blocked.

I understand that some limitations are necessary to prevent spam and other abuse, however this is a very blunt instrument. The fact that I have a 10 month old account with consistent activity should outweigh any IP address reputation issues.

Perhaps the VPN limitations could be narrowed in scope to cover only account creation and posts from young accounts.