evenwicht

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kenwood cr-st90s. Not sure about the OEM charger since I don’t have it.

The seller had a few of these same radios, new in box, but all missing the chargers. My thought was either the seller sold them separately or the chargers were stolen and so whatever retail store had them could not sell them and they ended up on the street market. But after seeing that the OEM chargers are strictly 9v, they seem worthless without the radio. Unless it’s just a shitty label. Maybe the OEM charger is proper USB PD, but they only wrote 9v on the label. I can only speculate.

The universal charger I have could also be dodgy. It was from a 2nd-hand shop. But afaik it’s fine.

Since I don’t have the OEM charger, I cannot see how it is marked. I just recall it was only marked 9v.

(edit) it’s also possible that the OEM chargers are poor quality and have short lives.. maybe the retailer opened boxes just to replace broken chargers for customers under warranty, which would also result in radios without chargers.

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evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 1mo ago

Dead battery was my 1st theory, but it’s questionable. I fiddled with a healthy demo unit (same model) at the store. The battery ran out of juice and the machine shut down. I plugged it in and hit the power button and it instantly turned on. So it can apparently run directly off the USB-C as the battery charges (and the manual says as much). But the one I have never powers on, even when connected to power.

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evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 1mo ago

voltage = current × resistance, IIRC my high school physics correctly. If current is zero, then voltage must also be zero, no? I don’t understand how voltage can be positive if amperage is zero.

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evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 1mo ago

Is the spec ambiguous on that then? Is a 5v default and a PSU without default both compliant?

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 1mo ago

USB-C chargers won’t work in this case, as they only output voltage, if they detect a device.

Note that the first 2 times I attached a universal USB-C charger to the radio, it gave a charging animation (though after ~30-45 min wait). So I am struggling to work out how that happened. Did the charger give up after waiting a long time and say “fuck it, will give some arbitrary power”?

You need a USB-A charger with a A-to-C-cable.

My universal charger has both USB-A and USB-C ports. I tried the USB-C port first (thus usb-c→usb-c). Then at one point I tried usb-a→usb-c. I was expecting usb-A to behave the same because the charger specifies the same range of voltages for both ports. The only difference is the max current is a little higher on the usb-c.

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evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 1mo ago

What would be the meaning of a default voltage then? My understanding of USB PD is that 5v is a default, which I took to mean it would deliver 5v in the absence of a handshake.

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 1mo ago

well, I can just choose something that suits my tastes instead from the internet?

I have no Internet, because the war on cash means there is tolerance for ISPs to effectively (and unlawfully) refuse to serve unbanked people. Being offline makes other info sources much more important. Unbanked people can get Internet but it’s a much higher price because only prepaid GSM providers are willing to take cash.

(In practice, I would rather that we had more resilient mobile infrastructure, as more and more people have phones and can receive SMSs in an emergency; and more people getting into CB due to the possibility for bi-directional communication)

Is that possible? SMS is notoriously unreliable. Sometimes I receive an SMS a full day after it was sent. Sometimes I never receive an SMS that someone is absolutely certain they sent. The tech seems to be inherently unreliable. Radio pagers from the 1980s are reliable. So it was foolish to ditch radio pagers, IMO. I wish I could buy a radio pager and subscribe. Some emergency response operations (firefighting and ambulance services) were smart enough to continue using radio pagers, but this service is not offered to the general public.

Is there a technical requirement for the 3+ seconds of decoding before sound output? Or is this a matter of simply waiting for buffers to be filled before outputting?

It’s a limitation of physics. No computer takes zero time to execute instructions. I don’t know to what extent buffering contributes to that, but it does not matter. You can’t really have a situation where all receivers are in sync with their decoding times. The only possibility would be to choose an easily achievable timespan, then mandate that all players add a delay. But this is borderline crazy talk. WRT point #1: given no legal interference, it would be possible for a radio to have several tuners so when someone is channel surfing, it could theoretically anticipate the need to give them the next signal in chronological sequence, to give an FM-like tuning experience.

Your points about 1 and 7 really seem like a product issue more than a technology issue

They are solvable issues, apart from point 4 (and realistically point 6 as well). That does not excuse a nationwide oppressive mandate to cut off FM transmissions and render all FM radio receivers as needless e-waste.

Point 6 is not really the fault of DAB but instead of how the infrastructure is setup. FM transmitters could be source their data from the cloud too, and would be vulnerable to the same things.

I would like to see the physical size difference between a vacuum tubes FM tuner and a DAB tuner. I doubt anyone will be making tubes DAB radios, but if they did there is a heck of a lot more complexity due to the AAC digital compression which must be replicated in analog circuits.

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 2mo ago

At the national levels. Western nations are independently making the same decision to nix it. Denmark kills FM this year. France in 2033 IIRC. Belgium also has plans to kill FM.

AM also on the chopping block.

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 2mo ago

A lawyer once told me there are a few left-leaning AGs who genuinely take the consumer protection role seriously. He named off a few states where he said you can expect decent treatment of compaints. Then he said a lot of AGs have no interest in the job at all. That they are just looking to climb the ladder and get a CV that enables them to run for governor. I think I have been quite unlucky with the states that are relevant to where I get burnt as a consumer. Though I don’t suppose that’s chance. The shittiest corporations are likely to select right-leaning anti-consumer states for their HQ.

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 2mo ago

I don’t consider successors to necessarily obsolete their predecessor. People still use and appreciate vinyl records despite having several successors (including magnetic tape which eventually lost ground to vinyl in the end, amid digital successors).

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 2mo ago

The story:

https://slrpnk.net/post/34202438

A commenter wrote:

“Just as stubbing your toe serves to remind you that you are real and alive, days-long server outages remind us that we are bare metal and not on a government-compromised cloud.”

Indeed!

evenwicht @lemmy.sdf.org 2mo ago

Have you never heard SSNs called slave surveillance numbers? It’s the same thing. They are synonyms -- borne from the fact that what was originally simply intended as a primary key in the DB of one gov administration became a global identifier ripe for abuse.