Could be. I mostly want uniformity across UIs. So it would be cool to be able to configure Anduril to be like random light X.

You mean you found the AI slop with google, not much help.

I’ve generally heard that it’s ok to discharge LFP batteries to 0%. You just shouldn’t store them that way (or at 100%) for long periods. Keep in mind that LFP has maybe half the energy density of the highest density NMC batteries, and sodium has maybe half that of LFP. Sodium really doesn’t sound that good batteries for portable devices.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s not yet any sodium charging chip for small consumer electronics like this. I haven’t heard of a sodium powered flashlght, phone, or anything like that before. The only sodium consumer device I know of right now is a Bluetti power station which has 900WH: https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pioneer-na

It got some attention at its anouncement but tbh it’s 10lb heavier and $300 more expensive than the 1024WH lithium version (Elite 100v2). So it’s for early adopters only.

If you want to charge a small sodium cell, you can probably program an MCU to deliver the right charge profile, along with a few small external parts. That’s how Apple phones worked at least in the past. They saved a fraction of a penny by just incorporating some extra logic and code in their big ASIC instead of having a separate charging chip. It’s kind of interesting that the charger was programmed in Forth, on a special Forth processor (b16-small) that they cooked into a hardware macro: https://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html . They hired Bernd (the b16 designer) to write the code and it was pretty intricate because of the cpu’s limitations. I don’t think I’d have used that approach ;).

Wurkkos TS27 has an LFP battery and is beefy and advertised as a duty light, and it seems nice except then it has this silly RGB ring light that turns it into a fidget toy. I lost interest because of that. YMMV. :)

https://wurkkos.com/products/ts27

Added: I just looked over the kickstarter page for this light. The battery looks to be 10,000mAH nominal, size 32140 which is 4.7x the volume of a 21700. Voltage is 3.0 nominal but looking at the discharge curve at -20C it looks about 2.5V on average, so 25 WH. Not that much better than a 5000mAH 3.6V 21700 (18WH). The sodium is somewhat worse but still viable at -40C and I guess it might be beating lithium by then too, plus it has the ability to accept charging at -40C. I don’t see super-cold charging as very important for a flashlight (if you’re able to charge your light you can probably keep it at least a little bit warm), though super cold operation can be helpful.

Also, this is a 2500 lumen light which is a far cry from the old Maglights that were perfectly usable. The classic 2AA minimag was around 5 lumens over most of its runtime, the huge 6D was something like 36 lumens, and the nicad powered Magcharger was about 180 lumens. Surely for changing a fuse, a low powered headlamp is preferable to a huge handheld ;).

I guess they must have had better internet in the French Revolution than we have here now! Everyone hates Comcast and now you know why ;).

Sodium batteries are mostly of interest for grid storage or maybe stationary home batteries once they get cheap enough. They are sort of marginal for EV’s but might find a place in some cold weather ones. Having them in a few weird flashlights isn’t going to help ramp up manufacturing volume compared to that. The real demand will come from power utilities buying gigawatts at a time, not a few flashlight nerds.

I remember the Eternalight and it went through a few nicer incarnations over time The designer was a regular on Candlepower Forums. IDK if the company still exists. The product was cool in some ways. IIRC it uses 5mm leds. The first production flashlight with a Luxeon was the Arc LS and I had two of them. I think the semi-custom McLux TK may have been earlier but my memory by now is hazy. I still have mine. Sodium batteries are different. Aside from the very niche advantage in cold weather charging, they are worse in every way than lithium. The main feature that makes them interesting is potentially lower cost per KWH in the long run. That’s great if you want a 100KWH off-grid battery for home, and maybe it can find its way into economy EV’s. But nerdy flashlights, nah, battery costs are not much of an issue already. The bigger light and fancier charging and regulation circuitry negate any advantage. We could already use LFP batteries if we wanted to, but we almost never do.

I noticed another review of this light at https://tgreviews.com/2022/07/23/sofirn-d25lr/ that has some useful extra info including a partial teardown photo, and a measurement of the parasitic current at under 1 microamp, very good. I think that review is of an older version of the light, since it has micro USB while mine has USB-C.

My brother had a micro-USB light (now lost) of this series, and it seems to me that the build quality of that light, while not terrible, was worse than the two I have now (H25LR and H25L. So maybe they got better at the time of the switchover. I still highly recommend these lights and don’t really want any more 18650 headlamps unless someone makes a suitable Anduril one.

Another review: https://www.stephenknightphotography.com/post/headlamp-review-sofirn-d25lr

Meh. I’m holding out for wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Cosmological restaurant. It’s at the end of the universe.

If anyone cares, this light was on sale for $10 last week (not any more) and I got one along with an H25L. The TS10 SG is great, smaller than I expected and a terrific value at $10. I will EDC it for a while. For some reason I thought it came with a USB-rechargeable 14500 but it’s the TS10 Max that comes with a USB cell. It’s ok though. I will probably get a D3AA sooner or later but this will do me for now.

I also got an HD10 a while back and I like that a lot too. Unfortunately it’s being discontinued, maybe in favor of the non-Anduril HD12. So we’ll again be in a situation of having no available Anduril headlamps with USB charging. Meh.

If they own houses that is public info.

The manufacturer web site is almost unusable and doesn’t have an ordering button. There’s a “Where to buy” link way at the bottom, that doesn’t work for me. Web search shows this is about a US$ 200 charger. Ouch. Thanks for the review but yikes. Also I don’t want to install a phone app to use or update the charger. You are right that the missing features being important (PC interface, bidirectional USB charging).

WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.

Sounds like it would be nice if Savannah offered Forgejo hosting.

Ok I used to feel sorry for non-libre streaming software users, but this is now in “one born every minute” territory. Thanks.

What the heck is this thing? Should many of us care?

Hmm ok, though if a security program needs frequent updates, that’s a cause for concern in its own right… :/

So do that. You can do that with Signal.

Do you know of anyone doing it? Other people have said there are difficulties.

You wouldn’t register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.

It is ok, in that era (dialup or wired internet) unencrypted http was basically as secure as unencrypted landlne phone calls. People still have unencrypted phone calls all the time. Typicalally sites would show public content (like product pages on an e-commerce site) by http, then switch to https for checkout to protect stuff like credit card numbers. Encrypting everything became important when wifi became widespread. Wifi hotspots would hijack DNS and spoof entire web sites to steal credentials. Also, LetsEncrypt made it possible to bypass the CA scam industry, making https-everywhere more popular. Public awareness also increased due to Snowden’s disclosures.

The RSA encryption patent also expired in 2000. Before that, US website operators were potentially exposed to hassle if they didn’t use a commercial server with an RSA license ($$$). But, it didn’t apply outside the US and FOSS SSL servers existed for those wanting them.

Those are nice generalities but I think they ignore reality. Jami seems like sort of a side project to its developers. Bug reports often are answered with a suggestion to make sure everyone is running the latest version of Jami, which is often useless advice. Like if you try to call your friend with your new phone and the call doesn’t complete, it’s unhelpful for your phone manufacturer to say your friend should get a new phone. You might be interested in helping fix the problem but your friend just wanted to have a phone conversation and doesn’t want to get dragged into a debugging project. It’s even worse if the other person is not your friend but rather is someone you just met and exchanged numbers with. If you try to follow up with a phone call and there is a problem, GAME OVER. You permanently lose contact with that person. You can’t possibly suggest Jami as a Skype replacement after that happens to you once or twice.

Another thing with comms programs in general is you really can’t debug them with just one computer. Their whole function is to let two computers talk to each other, so you need two computers where you control both ends and ideally control the network as well, so you can insert delays, network faults, etc. If the Android version has trouble talking to the Iphone version, you need both kinds of phones. I’m not sure if Jami’s devs really understand that. I’ve worked on telecom stuff in the past and it’s just the reality of that field.

Yet another (I’m not sure of this) is that Jami is a peer to peer program so I suspect some of the problems revolve around firewall traversal gotchas of various types. I don’t know if there is a cure for this while keeping the basic architectecture intact. I do like it in principle and I know that people get BitTorrent working reliably without too much trouble, so maybe Jami is just missing some trick.

Finally, Jami is pretty old and back in those days, people hadn’t really thought about the subtleties of encrypted group chats. Signal does a better job, and these days there is a standard (RFC 9420) for how to do it (I don’t know if Signal follows this standard). It would be good if Jami were revamped for that, but 1) that would break interoperability again, and 2) I don’t know if it’s workable at all with Jami’s architecture (serverless, using a distributed hash table for peer discovery).

For now I’ve sort of given up on Jami and am trying to figure out what to use instead. It’s unfortunate that the main devs don’t seem to have that much interest in making Jami reliable. Randos like me capable of making small contributions can’t really help much with more involvement from the experts.